Verticals
The Mid Market
To state the obvious, small and medium businesses dominate the landscape of American commerce. They provide the most jobs, fuel the economic growth of our country (not to mention their offshore suppliers) and provide the foundation for commerce that affects every citizen.
While the Fortune 500 companies and the household-known named business draw nearly all of the attention of the media, politicians and the public, the fact is, our economy is predicated and dependant on a healthy SMB climate.
When the big companies fail, they do so with a bang. If they’re big enough, taxpayers foot the bill. When it’s one of the little guys, they go out with a whimper, hardly noticed.
The business imperatives are the same. The requirements for efficiencies, process improvements, security, collaboration and mobility afforded a high-performance information infrastructure are on-par with the big boys.
But here’s something successful businessmen already know and neophytes need to discern immediately: small businesses need to be nimble. They have to be able to add resources, such as bandwidth, applications and data retrieval in a wink. They need to be able to collaborate with their suppliers in another time zone, perhaps across many time zones.
The fickle nature of the market and the competition of new market entrants means companies need the same capabilities, but scaled down to meet the needs of a few in spectacular fashion.
Unless there a clear and compelling reason not to do so, companies in these strata need to investigate the profound benefits of Cloud Computing.
Cloud computing provides the most sophisticated, most up-to-date and most maintained infrastructure. They take all the guess work, all the time and financial investment and the headache of trying to discern which manufacturer truly has your interests in mind, versus the mediocre IT player with a superior marketer. The fact is, unless you love taking on the burden of IT, you owe it to yourself to investigate the Cloud.
However, not all small business will be prime candidates for the Cloud. To that end, we work with our customers to determine exactly what they need to stay at the leading edge of their market niche.
Our approach is that company size cannot be a limiting factor for realizing the business benefits of a modern networking infrastructure. Specifically for this market, we partner with manufacturers who share our commitment to excellence. Our solutions for the SMB market have the same, full-functionality of the Service Provider and large enterprise customers, but have been scaled and priced specifically for the smaller customer. Beyond that, their performance, reliability, quality and feature-sets are the same – just in smaller footprints.
One of our customers runs several nice restaurants across three states. A couple serve lunch, but most are geared for the dinner crowd. We worked with him to determine what business processes we could help modify to unlock the full value of the system.
While his processes were state of the art, we learned that his prep staff was frequently interrupted to take reservations (which proved to be outside of best practices, given that the number of mishandled reservations was bad, but paying a full-time staffer to man the lines of each store for calls that may or may not come was equally unpalatable).
The solution was a very simple, very elegant approach. A mini-call center was set up so that a single person on duty could take the call from home, know which restaurant the caller was trying to reach to keep the experience personal by being able to access their data instantly. This enabled them to keep their local feel, and greet each caller in a familiar way and offer discounts on the customer’s preferred meal or free deserts, etc.
The net? Customer loyalty remains off-the-charts high, he runs his business like there’s no recession and continues to add workers to his payroll.
