Finding the middle way
WHILE LARGE CORPORATES have the luxury of being able to deploy their telecommunications well ahead and rethink strategies should technology move faster than originally thought, for small and medium businesses (SMBs) the need to protect their technological investments is more important.
Frank Mullen, COO of Itec Enterprise Solutions, says decisions are being made more difficult for SMBs – with around 100 employees – due to the changes currently happening in the technology sector. "I’d expect that while large corporates are being targeted directly by telecoms companies when their focus moves from the high end of the market to mid-size companies they’ll need to find a range of partners to access that market. That’s especially true considering the relationship that many of those companies have with their existing service providers."
Mullen says the amount of fibre optic cable being laid by the big telcos will, once it’s more fully deployed, have a positive effect on the technology operations of SMBs. The high bandwidth services being set up will also offer SMBs the ability to take advantage of new services they wouldn’t previously have been able to use. Those could include services such as hosted email and application solutions.
Although such services were available before, they were hampered by the lack of real broadband technologies. With services such as Metro Ethernet technologies it’s possible to run very high speed services between a company’s head office and its service provider, making it almost immaterial whether the systems hosting the services are housed at the company’s premises or not.
Orion Telecom MD Jacques du Toit says one of the challenges facing many SMBs is that, unlike big corporates that have a large number of staff concentrated in a corporate head office plus a number of reasonably sized operations scattered countrywide (or even in the same city) smaller companies are obviously less concentrated.
Says Du Toit: "While those companies may have smaller headcounts they often have the same geographic reach as some large enterprises. However, instead of having hundreds of people in key locations they may have only a few people servicing a location, with the head office providing the rest of the services."
So while major companies can hook up all their branches using high-speed links, SMBs have to use more small business and consumer-focused technologies to link branches away from head office.
However, he says even for companies currently not using high-speed networks there will be benefits, as all their upstream suppliers will be leveraging the new technology to improve the quality of the bandwidth available.
Increased competition will also open opportunities for SMBs to build more resilient systems.
Finweek
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