Small scale markets

  Every business needs up to date information technology. Bulgarian companies also. They are pressured by increasing competition in business environment, but opening of Bulgaria to international markets, direct relation with the country’s entry into the European Union.
  Dealing successfully with challenges, they increasingly depend on the collaboration tools. Access to shared resources is the key. It may be common accessed information, applications and devices. They should rely on the reliability and accessibility at any time. This is the birth of naturally need a computer, which can store and process the most important information about the company – especially developed by the manufacturer system, called server.
  With the rapid and headlong development of industry – all high class servers with 4 and 8 processors technology are available for the lower class machines, designed for small and medium businesses. With attractive prices of course. However, companies limited by their own IT budgets are often hesitate – server or PC?

  Servers are offered more widely, and most consumers begin think that it will be useful for managing files and printers, for hosting e-mail services, better network securing or even making more things than it could be made with desktop PC.
Its ok, but realizing the need for a server and actually revealing the exact model they need are two different tasks. It is obligatory to understand what a server is, which of its capabilities are useful for them, and decide whether they need a server and how to find right model.
  Most of Bulgarian companies are micro, assuming international understanding of company size. So, companies here start with one server, but with all of required form business services up and running. It seems well from financial point of view, but not from maintenance and support perspective. Microsoft for example, presumes dedicated server for each service as a best practice. This is not applicable for small scale markets. One option was Microsoft Small Business Edition. Main reason was customer gets most of frequently used services in a box solution. Even using a virtualization this model is the same. For most dedicated services on separate servers customers must purchase separate licenses for operating systems. So for most of Bulgarian companies best practices are consolidating services, not so much consolidating servers.
Situation is that most of Bulgarian mangers are owners of their business. They started little company and because of their professional experience at specific field, the beginning has been successful. Later they meet “problem of growth”. Micro company must become mini. It means more employees, collaboration tools and team work. There is no problem to hire more specialists. It’s quite easy to learn most of them how to work in team.

Main question is how to work together in better way?

  Yes, with new technologies, but very often business managers do not know anything about them. They must determine future of the company, but there is no company’s management know how.
Regular micro companies owns between 0 and 3 servers. For first group without server is important to realize the benefits from e-collaboration. Companies which have 2 and more servers may be useful to consolidate servers utilizing virtualization.

How to do this without company’s internal knowledge?

  Obviously, you will say: External consultants, of course. Most of Bulgarian IT companies can best do box moving. They work with micro clients and doing only sales of hardware or software licenses. So this type of IT companies does not have expertise for implementing solutions. Main reason is lack of place and time to earn experience. It’s magic circle. Fortunately there are big players already developed well their portfolio of professional services.

How market can adopt new technologies?

  This could be facilitated hiring well-rounded with hands-on experience specialists. They must provide technology knowledge to customers. This might be starting point of strategic planning for IT development. Most important is providing knowledge for solving a business problem, technical problem and then – how to take advantage over competitors.