A rich harvest of enterprise-class hardware and software is ready for selling to small and medium businesses. Despite smaller budgets their needs are often very similar.
CRN spoke to resellers, analysts and vendors to find out what's new, exciting and affordable for Australian small and medium businesses.
Storage
The exponential rise in data is forcing SMBs to larger hard drive sizes. Luckily, storage vendors have been breaking through price barriers to bring smart storage to a wider market.
Oracle's Sun unified storage 7000 series is a mid-range NAS box with a very low price, says Kevin McIsaac, an IBRS analyst. It is highly automated, which makes it simple to manage, and it uses flash storage for caching read and write activity, so SMBs can use high-capacity, low-cost SAS or SATA drives and still get good performance.
The 7000 system comes with enterprise features such as inline deduplication, compression and Fibre Channel.
Smart storage doesn't require moving to Fibre Channel. Several vendors have had success selling iSCSI-based systems that draw on existing networking skills within smaller businesses. "ISCSI has gained quite a lot of traction in the SMB arena," says Phil Sargeant, Gartner's research vice president for data centre technologies.
Dell has enjoyed success with its iSCSI-equipped Equalogic range. The vendor has quadrupled sales since it acquired the niche storage company at the end of 2008. Equalogic brought the iSCSI interface "to the masses" at an affordable price, Jay Turner, Dell's head of channels in Australia, says.
NetApp has also made simplicity a calling card for its entry-level FAS2000 series storage. "It's incredibly simple to manage for SMB environments," McIsaac says.
Network-based storage from SMB vendors such as Netgear, D-Link, Qnap, Buffalo and Iomega is rushing to meet small business demands.
"These vendors are probably not household names but they are providing quite healthy NAS-type systems," Sargeant says. These include dual power, dual Ethernet and RAID for fallback and resilience.
"They are features that wouldn't have appeared a couple of years ago in products of that ilk," Sargeant says.
One vendor worth considering for the higher end of SMB is Compellent. The "virtualised storage" vendor sells its hardware with perpetual software licences which means that customers can upgrade firmware and not forklift in later models.
Another advantage is that Compellent only sells one model which scales from 4TB to several petabytes, and it uses the ZFS open source file system.
NEXT: Backup
Backup is one bugbear of SMBs that never goes away. The task is often given a low priority and the most common vehicle, tapes, place too much reliability on human involvement.
Alliances are springing up between backup software and hardware storage vendors to simplify the process. Late last month Netgear and ShadowProtect announced a partnership to improve performance and functionality.
How long will SMBs continue to rely solely on on-premise solutions? While backing up every inch of data to the cloud may be unfeasible in terms of cost or bandwidth, saving important files such as financial information should be standard practice. Backup is tipped as one of the drivers of cloud services and new vendors are popping up with original ideas.
In the US last month Ctera Networks unveiled a new local NAS appliance which can be used for bare metal recovery of downed servers. The 4-bay, rack mount C400 comes with server agents to make it easier to backup and recover data related to a specific application and can back up not just data but a bootable operating system environment.
Ctera signed in Australia late last month with security distributor Whitegold Solutions.
If SMBs move their productivity applications to the cloud then backup is generally part of the service. Recently Google described how its free disaster recovery, synchronous replication and data backup for Google Apps for all users were superior to on-premise solutions.
Google Apps senior project manager Rajen Sheth said that Google Apps' data recovery and backup options are stronger than on-premise solutions. For e-mail, he wrote, small businesses usually have a mail server and copy e-mail data to tape at daily or weekly intervals. When something goes wrong, the tapes are used to restore the data that was saved prior to the most recent backup. "But the information created after the most recent backup is lost forever," he said.
Some small business owners will no doubt be reluctant to let go of their critical information. In June a US company called Backupify launched a service to back up all data stored in a Google Apps account to a local PC or another storage service, such as Amazon S3.
NEXT: Servers
Intel's Nehalem processor has given entry-level servers a lot more bang for their buck. Combined with virtualisation, few SMBs these days would need more than the three or four servers required to run up to 100 virtual machines (VMs), says IBRS' Kevin McIsaac.
"A low-end Intel box will support a minimum of 20 to potentially 50 VMs," he says. "You've basically got your data centre in a rack."
While processing power has gone up, electricity consumption has come down. Server vendors have focused on energy consumption in recent releases - the servers of three or more years ago were far less efficient than they are now, says Gartner's Phil Sargeant.
SMBs needing a prod to refresh their servers should take note that saving money by holding onto old equipment could be costing them a lot more in electricity bills.
"We have forecast that an organisation will probably spend as much on energy over three or four years than the cost of the server itself. That's the case today - you can determine what it means for servers that are three or four years old," Sargeant says.
Enter another enterprise feature new to small businesses: power management. Power management software finds the most efficient way of running applications by shifting workloads between servers and shutting down unnecessary drains on power.
Measures can include lowering cycle times of CPUs while idle and intelligently stopping fans. Virtualisation and power management work effectively together to spread virtual machines across servers for the most efficient arrangement.
"Generally speaking [SMBs] haven't probably focused on power in the past but because of the cost of energy going up they are going to have to," Sargeant says.
The larger server vendors produce their own power management tools which differ slightly in their features and goals.
One product that deserves a mention for the small end of town (up to 10 employees) is HP's microserver. The ProLiant MicroServer spearheads a new campaign HP is calling "Just Right IT" which targets micro and small businesses.
The microserver retails for $599 and is about half the size and half as quiet as other entry-level servers and chews less power, the vendor claims. Running on an AMD Athlon II chip, it includes 8GB RAM, RAID (0, 1), a Gbit Ethernet port and four SATA-drive bays.
NEXT: Unified comms
Phone systems and PBXs are so passé. Even SMBs are talking about unified communications these days. What does that mean in practice? Companies of all sizes want to link their email, calendaring, phoning and messaging into one platform.
While enterprise has been enjoying the fruits of unified communications for a while, Gartner's telecommunications analyst Geoff Johnson says Telstra's decision to offer it as a service through its T-Suite hosted platform legitimised the marketplace for smaller companies.
Awareness of the benefits is growing and businesses are willing to have conversations that extend beyond replacing the old phone system with another. Instead of a hardware conversation, it's all about the software - and Microsoft is looking like a very strong contender.
Most flavours of unified communications are happening on premise, Johnson says. However, Telstra and Microsoft are promoting its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) as a complete set of services for about $25 a month for each seat.
"For small business they pay opex not capex, and I can turn it on or off if I get busy and hire staff or if I have a downturn and have to let people go," Johnson says.
Johnson advises resellers to look at mid-market UC solutions from Microsoft and Cisco; the latter is moving into video and email collaboration and business-grade social networking.
"Resellers need to be aware of the trends so they can position themselves against it," Johnson says.
While beyond the budget of most SMBs, it's illuminating to look at the speed with which video is coming to enterprise unified communications.
Last month Avaya launched Flare Experience, a user interface and software platform for managing various forms of communication, including instant messaging, audio-, video- or web-conferencing, and social networking.
It includes a touch-and-swipe user interface, drag-and-drop voice and video conferencing capabilities, a virtual rolodex and the ability to download various productivity and other business applications.
Avaya and Cisco have been working on several-thousand-dollar Android tablets for portable video-conferencing. However, it's not hard to imagine the same technology moving quickly to smartphones, which puts it squarely within range of the SMB.
NEXT: Email
It's incredible that we're already in the year 2010 and we still expect small businesses to manage PST files. Managing Outlook archives has never been an easy or enjoyable task for anybody.
And it's not getting any easier. Many businesses running Microsoft Outlook 2007 or older set one standard size of mailbox for all employees which frustrates power users.
And 450MB for a mailbox these days is embarrassingly inadequate given that accounts from free online email services are measured in gigabytes.
Companies of all sizes are moving to hosted email services. Demand is so hot for hosted email that one reseller, managing director Nick Beaugeard of HubOne, told CRN that his sales team is walking around picking up several-thousand seat BPOS accounts - in government as well as private business.
SMBs wanting to free themselves of email management are also keen and early adopters. Businesses can choose a hosted email provider or go directly to the leading vendors themselves.
Google and Microsoft have been waging a running battle for the email accounts of university students and are slowly turning to focus on business. Choosing the right platform depends on what a business is using and how it intends to use it in the future.
Microsoft Exchange Online is part of the abovementioned Business Productivity Online Suite. It offers 25GB storage and integrates with social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Google's email platform, Gmail, also offers 25GB under its Premier Edition of Google Apps.
"If you're already a Microsoft site and you use a lot of the functionality in Exchange, then BPOS makes a lot more sense. On the other hand if you're an organisation that has just basic email, or if you're coming off Novell Groupwise, then Gmail might be attractive," says IBRS' Kevin McIsaac.
While Gmail may fall short on functionality and features, Google has made up for it by adding integration with its many other products including YouTube, Google Maps, and so on. And, importantly for SMBs, it has easier pricing.
"Gmail is a much simpler pricing strategy. Google Apps you get a single figure for everything they've got. Microsoft is still a very complicated licensing arrangement," McIsaac says.
Another email problem is bugging enterprises - archiving. Symantec's MessageLabs told CRN that email archiving is going to be its fastest growing market, driven by regulatory compliance.
Archived emails are tagged, copied, encrypted and replicated in its hosted data centre. Finding emails or information is just as important as storing them, says MessageLabs.
It will be interesting to see whether SMBs turn to vendors like MessageLabs to archive their on-premise email or go straight to the cloud with Google and Microsoft, which offer their own archiving services.
NEXT: Smartphone
The Apple-led influx of smartphones into the lives of ordinary people has been a consumer revolution. However, its impact on business has been no less remarkable.
For resellers there are few opportunities to sell services with iPhones to SMBs, but that will change quickly. Employees in large enterprises have also brought their smartphones with them to work which has created issues with security, integration and mobile device management.
Enterprises are moving from an environment standardised on a single device such as a Blackberry to one with competing platforms (Apple iOS, Google Android) and device types (smartphones, tablets, unified communications devices).
"Next year they might have five different platforms and then it becomes really messy. All of a sudden it's become a hell of a lot harder to use the [number] of platforms employees want to use," says Robin Simpson.
Vendors such as Sybase have released mobile management software to manage and secure these platforms.
Sybase, recently acquired by SAP, sells its Afaria platform to back up, encrypt and remotely wipe data on mobile devices. It also provides a centralised console for updating, removing and adding applications, data and content on a mobile-device fleet without users' knowledge or input.
SMB needs may be humbler but they still need centralised management for co-ordinating contact management, email and remote backup.
Melbourne-based managed services provider ManageNet scooped up MobileIron, a mobile device management application from the US backed by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. MobileIron can set up email, enforce security policy, and find and wipe any registered device. Besides iPhones it handles iPads, Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile.
ManageNet business development manager Denham Seneviratne says that because MobileIron is approved by Apple for iPhones in the enterprise, ManageNet has received leads directly from the popular vendor.
"I've never seen a pipeline like it," Seneviratne says. "It's a very hot space." ManageNet recently won Simplot and Murray Goulburn and is working with Rio Tinto, NAB and BHP.
Employee-owned iPhones are driving demand in 90 percent of cases and SMBs are already signing up, says Seneviratne. Carlton Football Club, a recent customer which has about 60 employees with iPhones, was struggling to manage and secure them.
The main concern are hacked (or "jailbroken") iPhones posing a security risk to corporate email or wireless networks. MobileIron also controls global roaming charges by providing live data on usage.
It is worth checking out the competition. MobileIron told ManageNet it wasn't looking at any other reseller for Australia except Telstra.
NEXT: Managed print
The managed print model, popular in enterprise and mid-market, is coming to SMBs because it promises a lower and more predictable total cost of ownership.
It also moves print from the capital expense column to an operating expense, and separate buying decisions (printer, toner, paper) are rolled into one that only needs to be reviewed every three years. Per-page billing makes it easier to allocate costs internally.
SMB resellers have been slow to build a managed print services business for several reasons. In part it's because selling a managed print service is very different to moving boxes.
Instead of one large hit when the printer is sold, payment is dragged out over years. And many SMBs don't need or can't afford the A3 printers around which a managed print contract is usually sold.
Oki is the first printer vendor to target deliberately the SMB managed print market. It launched its reseller-only Executive Series to 40 Australian partners in April and added five mono-colour and colour models to the range this month.
The Executive Series multi-function and single-function printers stand out in three ways. They are only available as part of managed print services contracts; the devices will only accept toner that is microchipped and designed specifically for these models; and they only come in A4 size.
Oki's Australian managing director Takaaki Hagiwara said customers are charged by the page and that it is a disadvantage to buy toner outside the MSP program. "The cost per page goes up," Hagiwara says.
This pricing strategy locks out catalogue and online companies which often sell grey-market toner below the cost price of local product.
Oki only sells LED printers which have fewer moving parts than lasers, and the vendor claims its machines are more reliable and robust. The Executive Series come with three-year warranties, the length of the standard managed print contract.
Hagiwara says the gap between the hardware cost of an A4 and an A3 printer is still surprisingly large. He says the Executive Series are aimed at SMBs with under a few thousand pages per month. "An A3 printer is not the right product for them. The lease cost is two to three times the running costs. A4 is much cheaper," he says.
NEXT: CRM
Customer relationship management is a foreign term to many small businesses. Most would be unlikely to use anything more complicated than Microsoft Outlook to manage their customers, suppliers and partners.
In the past CRM has been an expensive software purchase that required a dedicated server, expensive integration with email and other applications - in short, it fell in the too-hard basket.
Cloud computing has changed that. After its founding in 1999 by ex-Oracle engineers, Salesforce has rapidly risen to become the third most popular CRM product in the world, sitting just behind giants Oracle and SAP.
Leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities are all tabbed along one dashboard.
In the centre of the main page are dashboards that show how a sales person is doing with their quota, their biggest deals and the sales pipeline.
The program integrates with Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and Google Apps (although a third-party plugin is needed to work with Office 2010 - a sticking point for some). Prices start at US$5 a user a month for a basic contact manager which tracks customer interactions and co-ordinates tasks and reminders.
For $25 a month a business can capture leads from its web site, track sales opportunities and Google AdWords performance, and get access to the CRM's pre-built dashboards and reports. The price also includes 12x5 phone support.
Salesforce's success has spawned many imitators. Sage, Microsoft, Sugar and Oracle have released their own software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions and there are a host of new CRM players with no history in on-premise software.
While margins on SaaS services are not particularly rewarding, the services involved in migration and integration can be. And introducing SMBs to the benefits of sales automation creates goodwill and could open the door to a unified communications sale.
NEXT: Wireless networking
Who knew networking could be so exciting? Competition in the SMB market is so hot that vendors have started grabbing more and more features from enterprise to improve the value of their routers and switches rather than compete on price.
D-Link in particular is pursuing the bigger SMBs and mid-market companies in the wireless space. Witness the launch last month of its DSR-1000N wireless N router, which comes with dual Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports, dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n, operates on 2.4 or 5GHz bands and green features that reduce wireless power automatically during off-peak hours.
The standout attraction is its ability to create virtual private network (VPN) connections. The DSR-1000N supports up to 70 simultaneous VPN tunnels using protocols such as IP Security (IPSec), Point-to-Point (PPTP) and Layer 2 (L2TP). It can also manage 20 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN tunnels.
Maurice Famularo, marketing director, D-Link Australia and New Zealand says there are planned firmware enhancements to support a USB-connected 3G Internet service.
It is quite a feat to find a router that provides load balancing and automatic failover and more for a retail price of $610. Gartner's Bjarne Munch says D-Link latest appears to be a low-cost version of a Cisco integrated services router and is a "more powerful proposition for a branch office edge router than typical comparable products from vendors such as Netgear".
Amazingly, there is room for still more vendors. Ruckus has had a low profile in Australia until its recent signing with Avnet. The company has sold its wireless routers directly through telcos in many countries and is now looking at the SMB market.
The wireless-only vendor is best known for its patented "smart antenna" technology which is less prone to interference and better at delivering high bandwidth. Its Zone Director series is easy to manage and automates a number of functions.
A full review from CRNTech on page 59 notes that Ruckus is well suited to resource-strained resellers or IT departments in smaller or midsize enterprises.
And with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, SMBs are slowly adding wireless extensions to their Ethernet networks.
NEXT: Virtual desktops
To an enterprise, the virtual desktop is all about security and management. Data is kept in the data centre where it can be protected, categorised and backed up.
To an SMB, a virtual desktop is also about the speed of deployment and ease of maintenance.
Adding an employee typically requires buying a desktop, buying and installing the software, configuring it for network and shared drive access, and programming the phone. That's several hours wasted by the office manager or business owner or a sizeable bill from the reseller just to get another staff member connected.
Rolling out a virtual desktop is far less complicated because extra applications can be delivered from the data centre by increasing the number of licences. The operating system, applications and user profile can be pushed out through a standard operating environment (SOE) that already has network settings and permissions configured.
And security is far less of a worry. Protect the data centre, and your information should be ok.
And the hardware is more robust and cost of maintenance is far lower. A thin client can last six years rather than the average three or four, which is good news for customers.
Citrix has been selling this technology for years, largely to the enterprise.
Its push into SMB has been accelerated by the prospect of competition from VMware. In the US Citrix and Microsoft have been teaming up to pry out VMware by offering to swap licences free of charge. It will be a very interesting space to watch.
Many resellers have plans to sell desktops on demand to SMBs; some, like Melbourne-based Enspire, already have a list of small business customers and are beefing up their data centres to prepare for more.
A vendor to consider is the UK-based ThinkGrid, which is available in Australia through distributor Vadis. ThinkGrid gives resellers several options for rolling out virtual desktops.
With companies looking at a move to Windows 7 from XP, going the whole hog with virtual desktops should be considered as a serious option.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
