Category Archives: Planning

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How (and why) to Trust your Trusted Advisor

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I was in a networking group once where we had to go around the room and describe what makes us different than our [sometimes larger] competitors. Although all of us were from different industries, virtually everyone’s value proposition could be summed up into one word. Trust!

When I was a kid, I learned that trust had to be earned. I still believe that today. The question is, how do you trust someone to advise you on something you don’t understand?

I have advisors for Marketing, Insurance and Taxes. Not subjects I went to school for, nor do I profess to be an expert in any of them. However, I do consider myself good judge of character and being an advisor myself, I know what it takes to earn trust.

Results Matter
No one can talk about trust without considering results. Obviously that’s number one. A good trusted advisor will help you develop goals on which to measure success. My marketing advisor develops goals to measure hit count on my website, conversion rates, new sales leads, etc. With my Tax guy, it’s how he manages my deductibles and how susceptible am I to an audit. My Insurance agent makes sure I have the coverage I need. She’s not the cheapest in the world (and she tells me that), but she’s upfront and makes a real effort to understand my needs.

The point is, to measure results, the proper goals need to be set and you should be able to gauge how well you do in achieving them. It goes beyond ‘under promise – over deliver’. Anyone can under promise. Goals should be realistic. It’s also not as important to hit them on the first throw as much as how you can change up the game if you miss your target or don’t get the results you want.

Communication
One of the best value principals of a good advisor is communication. The advisors I trust are the ones who give it to me straight. In sales, we’re taught to tell the customer what they want to hear. Advisors are here to tell us what we need to hear. It may not always be good news, but if you need to hear it, it’s valuable.

Time is Money
Once you find an advisor you trust, how much time do you spend validating their work? If your advisor gives you a quote, do you look for a better one? Maybe, if the time it takes to shop doesn’t exceed the amount of money you might save on the their offer. However, I’ve seen people spend 10 hours to save $100. Not my favorite approach.

Disclosure
Ultimately, the best people I trust are the ones that are forthcoming about their commission rates, competitor pricing, markups and wholesale costs. That doesn’t mean they have to volunteer all that information, just that they’re honest about what they’re making on the deal and how much risk they’re assuming. Not everyone can do this, but the ones who can, usually earn my trust pretty quick.

Dedication
When you have an advisor you really trust, nurture that relationship. They will usually be there in a pinch when you need them most.

I’m not personally a strong believer in the 80/20 rule. At least not in the ways it’s used in sales. The most common translation I see is to focus 80% of your time on the top 20% of your customers. Personally, I strive to give 110% to every customer and I expect the people I do business with to do the same. Because Trust is the name of the game. If you’re advisor gives you the impression they’re putting 110% into you, ask yourself, are you in their top 20%, or do they bring that dedication to every table.

 


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Worry free connectivity on a small business budget

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How much does your business depend on connectivity? 80%, 90%, higher? It is virtually impossible to do business these days without connectivity to the outside world. Even businesses with only the slightest amount of technology need to be connected to the Internet to conduct business. Information Week estimated that IT outages cost roughly $26.5 Billion in lost revenue in 2011. It’s only getting worse. Add Cloud services, Voice over IP, & web services to your list and the dependency approaches 100%

The good news is that a resilient network is not the work of genius tech gurus who sit on mountain tops and come at a price that would make a Fortune 500 cringe. Creating a resilient, worry-free network is much easier than it used to be.

Vendor Fail-over
Internet connectivity is now so cheap, that it’s affordable to have a redundant Internet connection from a secondary provider. With even a low-cost, commercial security appliance, a secondary Internet connection can sit in a passive, stand-by state waiting for an outage on the primary line. Once this outage occurs, the secondary connection is made active and traffic flows seamlessly.

Cost of a solutions like this can run from $500 – $1,200 for a commercial appliance and an extra $60-$200 per month for a secondary Internet service (depending a lot on the size and scope of your company). Since this is a fail-over service, it doesn’t need to be as fast or reliable as your main connection, just enough to get you by until the primary service comes back on line.

Eliminating Single Points of Failure
While it it not 100% possible to eliminate all points of failure, the more redundancy that is put in place, the more resilient your network will be. A majority of the major players in small business network equipment offer “HA pricing” (high-availability) at a fraction of the cost of the primary device so you can double up on firewalls, routers or switches without doubling your cost.

Cloud Advantage
Making educated decisions about utilizing Cloud solutions can add to your resiliency. Many cloud providers replicate services to various locations so your services are up as much as possible. Did you know that Microsoft’s Office 365 services are replicated to data centers across the nation?

Good cloud providers offer guaranteed up-time measured in 9’s. For example, they might offer “three 9’s” or 99.9% up time. This means they can only be down for around 4 hours a year. Common guarantees are in the three – four 9 range, but some of the big players are even higher. Amazon Web Services guarantees eleven 9’s of up time, or 99.999999999%!

Monitoring – The forgotten necessity
One of the biggest mistakes commonly made when designing a fault-tolerant network is the lack of good monitoring. A good monitoring solution involves a 3rd party service, off your network that monitors up-time remotely. This way, if a redundant service kicks in, someone can be alerted so they troubleshoot the issue or call the appropriate vendor.

Without proper monitoring, you may not know you’re running in a crippled state.

Designing for Fault Tolerance
No matter what solutions you put in place, a fault-tolerant network is more than just a redundant service or device. Specific practices need to be put in place to ensure that devices are configured, proper services are ordered, systems are tested and proper monitoring & alerting is in place.

This takes a designer who can help you decide two metrics which will help budget for such a design. Return to Operation -time required to fail over to the redundant solution and Recovery Point Objective -specific services that need to fail over for business to run smoothly.

Summary
Designing a fault-tolerant network can take the worry out of service outages and equipment failure, but it needs to be designed properly. A good network architect will setup a recovery testing plan and simulate failures to make sure the system is redundant. These systems should be reviewed often to ensure they’re still functioning properly.

CBC Solutions offers Fault-Tolerant Network Design as a service. We perform a business analysis to help you decide the right budget. Then we provide best in industry solutions to take away the worry of your connectivity to the outside world so you can stay focused on your business.


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5 Ways You Can Benefit From A Technology Broker

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Technology Brokers are a unique type of technical consultant. They don’t generally sell any product. Instead they build strategic partnerships with vendors and service providers, then integrate their services into your business. Technology Brokers work on your behave to negotiate rates & contract terms. If the Broker is also a Consultant, they will help you find the right technologies and fit them into your business model. Below are 5 ways they can help:

 1. We have a large partner base to work with – It takes a lot of time to find the right vendor or reseller to work with. As a business leader, you may go out on your own to find a vendor through Internet search or word of mouth, and then take your chances that the vendor will be easy to work with, will keep your interest in mind, and will always strive to keep your business. A Broker has a much bigger landscape of trusted and true providers and they know who will work in your best interest.

2. Staying with the same old vendors can lead to stagnation – While vendors don’t like to lose clients, they can also get a bit complacent if they don’t feel there’s any danger of their customer switching to a competitor. A Broker will recognize this and know when to put pressure on the vendor to stay competitive.

3. Switching costs are minimized – The cost of switching providers include loss of customer incentives, learning curves, configuration / integration cost and time in re-establishing a business relationship. When you use a Broker, they can manage a good amount of this for you. Customer incentives are usually well known to the Broker and you may be able to take advantage of competitive upgrade deals, learning curves can be reduced when the Broker provides you with proper training, and the costs of deploying the solution may also be absorbed by the Broker by having them bundle configuration in with the product.

4. They can offer good contract negotiation – Since Technology Brokers work with contracts so often, they can spot issues in contracts and help you mitigate them with the vendor. Contract issues such as auto-renew clauses, termination fees, service levels and contract length can be negotiated by the Broker better since the Broker generally knows what vendors are willing to red-line and what adjustments should be proposed.

5. Anxiety is reduced – Brokers can remove the anxiety of switching to a different product or service. They have been in the business long enough to know what risks exist with certain product switching. They can generally help you be prepared for a hard learning curve, adjustments you need to make on related systems and any other dependencies that the vendor won’t tell you.

 CBC Solutions is a Technology Broker and Business Consultant. We analyze your business to find out not only where adjustments need to be made to your current services and products, but also what the total costs are of switching. We help businesses make a smooth transition and follow up frequently to make sure the services are working to improve business functions, reduce costs and manage risk.

 


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How a telecom agent can help you save money

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When reviewing a technology budget, look at the cost of Telecommunications. High-speed Internet, private lines, phone services, PBX, long distance and even cloud servers. These are all monthly costs that quickly add up. Many business leaders miss these costs when calculating budgets or working to reduce operating costs. They add up quickly.

To add to this problem, there are new technologies and better pricing popping up every day. This leads to added confusion and budgets can get outdated very quickly. Fortunately there is hope. A growing field in the industry today is that of a Telecom Agent. This person has good ties to multiple vendors and can readily get the best pricing and help you navigate through the noise.

A Telecom Agent that is connected to multiple vendors and is familiar with the industry can save you thousands of dollars a month, often without billing you for their services. They do this through integrated provider networks where they can submit your needs and get the best pricing from multiple vendors. The agent then collects a commission through either the provider or the partner network and never has to bill you for that service.

Here’s how it works. 

The Telecom Agent should ask a few questions to get an idea of what you need from a technology standpoint. They may even review your current billing to get an idea of what you’re actually using as far as Internet bandwidth, voice services, long distance minutes, and even Cloud Servers. Then, the agent contacts a list of providers in your area to get the best deals. In some cases they may package services to save you even more money and simplify deployment.

Once the proper quotes are received, the agent will send them to you and hopefully explain the various options to help you make the right decision. If you don’t like any of the options, that’s OK. If you do, you sign the agreement with the carrier, not the agent. The carrier and/or partner network works out commission with the agent.

Another benefit to agents is that they usually have better contacts within the carriers so they can assist with deployment, contract negotiation and support. Consider this. Say you have a long distance service that is $5 / minute. A typical monthly bill shows usage of 80 minutes of long distance. That equates to $400 / month or $4,800.00 per year. Now say the agent can get your long distance down to $1.9 / minute either by finding another provider or through 100 minute blocks bundled in with another service. Now your monthly costs go down to $152 / month and you save an average of $2,976.00 ever year. This same practice can be placed on voice lines and Internet access which, when bundled, can save even more.


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Keys to a healthy technology budget

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Practically every business these days spends a sufficient amount of money on technology, however surprisingly few have a healthy technology budget. Either they are spending more on products, services and overhead than the solution saves them, or they don’t spend enough to keep systems and applications running efficiently. Move over, many business are still not taking full advantage of the Cloud.

There are many reasons for this. The most obvious is that Technology Professionals are not typically versed in business (and often don’t care to be). Another is that the environment is changing so rapidly that it’s almost insurmountable for a business decision maker to understand the options that are out there. There are a lot of Consulting agents willing to help, but not all of them take a holistic approach to planning a technology budget.

Identify the Business Requirement

In order to adequately evaluate the solutions in place, it’s necessary to have a clear understanding of the process that the solution is here to solve. Take the focus off the technology, infrastructure and product and move it toward the specific part of the business process that it addresses.

Understand your TCO

Many times we get sticker shock when we look at certain solutions which can force us to scale down and ultimately end up with a solution that costs more to operate and support then it would to just purchase the right product or service. It’s thus important to have a full understanding of the Total Cost of Ownership for the product in question. Cheap or free can sometimes lead to huge support costs and unexpected downtime.

Long Term Planning

To be effective and still keep up with the changing landscape, I’ve found it’s important to look at the long term. When I say “long term” in technology, I’m talking 3-5 years. Depreciation cycles should be set at roughly 3 years. Contracts are best as a 1 or 2 year, though there can be massive savings available with a 3+ year contract.

All of this should be re-evaluated every year to make sure the costs and technologies match the offers available. When signing a long-term contract, always make sure you know what options are available to terminate early. For example, you may want to term the contract in a year because you are moving offices. In this case, you have two options. One is to transfer the service to your new location, the other is to end it completely. If you’re moving out of an area serviced by that vendor, you have no option but to terminate it.

Vendors should have provisions in their contracts for early termination. There may be an early termination fee. This cost should be factored in as a risk when the contract is signed. They may also offer a way to move service to your new location for free. To determine the value of this, make sure you know what the cost of that move would be if that offer wasn’t on the table.

Utilize the Cloud

Cloud Computing has commoditized technology, but it’s costs need to be controlled. See Time for IT to Rein In Cloud Computing Control. Cloud services can really help get costs under control. I’m not talking the generic “OpEx vs. CapEx” discussion that most Cloud Consultants use. That discussion is for another day. I’m talking about the costs of building an infrastructure and the costs of maintaining that infrastructure vs. paying for what you use when you use it.

Consider this. Before the cloud, we used to have to spend a lot of time defining the architecture, spec’ing out the right services, building up the servers, network, and access control, and planning for disaster recovery, backups & antivirus before we even install the first application. The graph below is an example of what those costs look like. It starts with a large expense in the form of hardware, software and often services. This expense offers virtually no value to the organization. Next, IT spends time installing and configuring applications and services to bring the solution to life and then starts rolling it out to end users. In the graph below, the orange lines equate to large purchases, while the blue line is the utilization of the service.

Capital costs

I know that the math geeks out there are going to cry foul on these charts. That they’re generic and don’t represent re-world scenarios. I agree. Real costs can fluctuate greatly, but it does provide a model to compare how costs relate to utilization so bear with me.

Once end users start using the solution, the value of it starts to grow. The green shaded areas indicate where the solution is adding it’s most value, while the red regions show where the costs exceed the value. The more the utilization, the higher the value, however, once the utilization reaches a certain point, the infrastructure can’t keep up with the demand and performance suffers. Until another large expense is allocated. Then the costs out-weigh the utilization and the process starts all over. Meanwhile the costs keep going up. Sound familiar?

Software As A Service
Under the Software As A Service (SAAS) model, your costs are directly proportional to the utilization and the net value of the services is more directly propositional to the costs. Again, please excuse the generic graph.
cloud costs

This is the real value of the Cloud. This is a Rent vs. Buy discussion. Think about a house. It’s a big expense. Much bigger than a rental, but you build up equity the more you put into it. Plus, unless you’re in a depressed area, the value of your house appreciates over time.

Now compare that to a car. The car depreciates in value the minute you drive it off the lot and continues to depreciate every year. Even if you don’t drive it. Leasing might be the better option from a purely financial aspect. No dollar you put into your car is coming back to you in 10 years.

Comparatively, the same happens with infrastructure. Your technology infrastructure will continue to depreciate until it becomes an expense to just keep it around. And it will depreciate at a faster rate than your car. Retiring old infrastructure can be quite costly as well.

Factor in Administrative Costs
Ever take a real look at how much time and money is put into supporting your technology infrastructure. The orange region of the chart below relate to overhead costs to support power and cooling, hardware maintenance, patching, virus protection, backups, fail over, remediation testing and upgrades. These are the area’s most IT departments spend a majority of their time. It’s important to note, that none of the tasks I just mentioned add any value to the business at all. The value add starts above the red line. To run an effective IT shop, you have to manage where that line is. The upper layers include software configuration, application customization and service provisioning which is where IT becomes a strategic asset to the company.

admin costs'

 

When you buy applications as a service, the orange region goes away and IT is working strictly as a strategic asset. The overhead costs are greatly diminished. Plus, when a better solutions comes around, you simply stop service on the old solution. There’s nothing to retire.

Long Term Planning
To be effective and still keep up with the changing landscape, it’s important to look at the long term. Contracts & solutions should be re-evaluated every year to make sure the costs and technologies match the offers available. When signing a long-term contract, always make sure you know what options are available for you to terminate early. For example, you may want to term the contract in a year because you are moving offices. In this case, you have two options. One is to transfer the service to your new location, the other is to end it completely. If you’re moving out of an area serviced by that vendor, you have no option but to terminate it.

Vendors should have provisions in their contracts for early termination. There may be an early termination fee. This cost should be factored in as a risk when the contract is signed. They may also offer a way to move service to your new location for free. To determine the value of this, make sure you know what the cost of that move would be if that offer wasn’t on the table.

Summary

The main point of this post is that your technology budget is a large part of your operating costs. With the right consideration and long-term planning, it can be managed in such a was as to keep the companies finances in order and add value to the organization A good technology consultant who is focused on the business should be able to help you see the long-term hard and soft costs and assist with negotiating the best contracts on your behave.

 

 


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Why you need a Cloud Consultant

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“Cloud Computing” has got to be the most misunderstood term since the technological revolution began. Not to mention all the sub-terms and acronyms that go with it.

With all these different flavors of computing, how a business leader know which one to pursue?

The good news is, you don’t have to. All you need to do is adequately define what your real requirements are and find the service that meet those needs. A Cloud Consultant can help.

 A business computing environment can be broken down to three parts. Processes, Data, & Services. Applications align with your business processes, store & retrieve data then deliver it to the user through a service. The questions you need to ask yourself are:

  • How is my data stored?

  • Are the processes aligned with my business?

  • How fast & reliable should the service be?

A Cloud Consultant should ask you some critical questions to help you define requirements. Do you care where you data is stored and how secure it is? Are your business processes well defined and are they efficient? How much downtime and delay can your business handle?

 Knowing these questions will help the consultant find the best services for your business. A good consultant will address these issues before getting into cost.

 Speaking of cost. The draw to Cloud Computing isn’t always that it’s cheaper, though that’s often the case. The real reward comes in the fact that the costs are predictable and scale up and down with utilization. With the right set of services, the costs will be more predictable and help drive down your bottom line.

 Internal solutions usually start with a costly investment in hardware, software, services & infrastructure. These costs generate negative value when they’re fist deployed. The value doesn’t come until the utilization of the services hits a certain threshold. Once the business starts using the solution, there’s a brief value add and the investment pays off.

Eventually the utilization will out live the capacity of the solution, and upgrades will be required. What happens then? Another large investment. The costs of upgrading, migrating and shutting down the old systems come in to play and now it’s even longer before you recuperate the costs.

 In contrast, a solution “As A Service” doesn’t usually require a lot of up front costs. A monthly fee is applied based on utilization so that the costs will scale with the value the solution provides. As your organization uses the service, the costs will rise. If the service doesn’t add value and it’s used less, the costs go down. It’s much easier to retire a service and the upgrades are handled by someone else.

CBC Solutions is a product agnostic organization that specializes in defining the business requirements and aligning solutions up that meet those needs with a predictable cost model with verifiable efficiency metrics.


Free yourself from the worry of technology and get back to running your business today!