Making your life easier
Networking technology may have lost some of its glamour after the recent slump in the IT industry, but networks are nonetheless more important than ever before. And with much of the technological work of recent years now embodied in real-life products, an ever-broader array of choices has once more made investing in a network a strong imperative.
As businesses continue to move their operations into the world of e-business, networks will continue to gain in strategic importance both as conduits for information within an organisation, and enablers to link the business to the world via the Net. And even though IT budgets may be showing signs of malaise right now, prudent planners will take this time to regroup and plot long-term strategies for online business services.
More and more often, these strategies will incorporate some element of outsourcing. While you may have dabbled in outsourcing in the past, the all-or-nothing approach championed during the late 1990s has given way to a more measured effort in which service providers take on responsibility for specific parts of your network.
Any number of companies, for example, are now happy to take on the responsibility of monitoring your network for faults and responding to those faults as quickly as possible. This can not only relieve you of the burden of chasing up vendors for support, but can reduce your ongoing costs by obviating the need to maintain a 24-hour roster of in-house technical specialists.
Other technology areas getting attention from service providers include virtual private networks, extranets, Web hosting, procurement, VoIP services, and just about anything else you're willing to pay for.
"As much as possible, we're trying to take everything away from the customer, including the management services," says Christophe Bur, director of products with Optus Business, which offers a variety of managed data services over its own expanding IP network.
"Managing very reliable networks is what a carrier does for a living, and we're in a position to overcome customers' natural fear of handing networks over to just anybody. We have the technology, know how to do integration pretty well, and we're ideally positioned to do that for customers."
So why not take advantage of it? By combining today's managed services with the right technologies to deliver rapid business benefits, you can provide important new services that expand the capabilities of your growing network. Find the right services to improve your business, and the next time you're facing up a front boardroom table full of executives asking "what will this do for us?", you'll have an answer you can take to the bank.
Your story gets a bit repetitive around paragraph nine in the MAN chapter...