ESCAPING THE MIDDLE GROUNDAGILITY AND THE SME

JIM BURNS – TALKTALK BUSINESSIAN WATT - OVUM

Agenda Today

The Research findings

The importance of Agility in today’s environment

Agility Tips

Agility

Responsive to change; primed for opportunity; and resolute against risk.

Research sample – smaller companies

The smaller company sample comprised 310 companies with 10-200 employees, half of which had 50+ employees

Respondents were IT and other senior decision-makers with ICT purchase influence

Almost half of respondents were in ICT roles

Almost two-thirds of SME respondents regard ICT agility as common sense/sound management practice

What does ICT agility mean to you?

62% of smaller company respondents believed ICT agility to represent sound business management

13% regarded ICT agility as a key source of competitive advantage

12% regarded ICT agility as representing investment underpinning the long-term validity of the business

Half of respondents feel their organisation’s approach to agility is sub-optimal

How would you describe your organisation's approach to agility?

Roughly half of respondents felt their organisation struck the right balance on agility

But about a third felt their organisation was held back by the ICT technology currently used

A further 14% felt their organisation overlooked agility completely

6% felt their company’s ICT solution was over-engineered for agility, with a range of options rarely or never used

Legacy systems coupled with budget constraints are seen as the main obstacles to agility

What restricts you most in moving towards

becoming more agile from a technology

perspective?

Almost half of respondents regarded the main barriers to agility as legacy technology resulting from cost constraints

This view was particularly strong among smaller companies

Poor IT literacy and lack of affordable choices were also seen as significant barriers particularly among smaller companies

Affordable technology is seen as the main game changer for agility, particularly among smaller companies

The biggest game changer to your

organisation's ICT agility agenda would be...

Among smaller companies, about half of respondents regarded affordability as most important in increasing ICT agility

Among medium-sized companies, affordability was seen as most important by over a third of respondents

This supports the hypothesis that SMEs are only as agile as their technology choices allow them to be

A majority of respondents agree that SMEs have to choose between paying too much and receiving too little

'Small and medium-sized businesses are limited to two choices:

Use costly and complex enterprise-grade solutions or affordable but feature-light consumer-grade technology. There is very little in-between.’

Almost two-thirds of respondents agreed that SMEs are limited to two choices: using costly and complex enterprise-grade solutions or affordable but feature-light consumer-grade technology.

Agility Report Summary

A rock and a hard place

Beta state of mind

Less is more

Being Agile allows you to cope with

change !

84.4%GROWTH IN MOBILE TRAFFIC

YEAR ON YEAR

1/3 OF TRAFFIC

Now VIDEO

44x

GROWTH IN NETWORK TRAFFIC IN NEXT 10 YEARS

Bandwidth Growth Sept 2012 – Sep 2013

Average traffic Sept 2012 385Gb Sep 2013 850Gb – 120% increase

Peak Traffic Sept 2012 415Gb Sep 2013 950Gb – 130% increase

Total network traffic on TalkTalk Next Generation Network

400

200

800

600

Performance

82% have experienced networkoutages that have had an impact on business

Business Continuity

64% have experiencedsome form of disruption/compromise due to bandwidth restrictions

Security & Mobility

53% say their networks either don’tpermit or don’t support BYOD

Monitoring & Maintenance

64% feel they can easily makechanges to their network where needed

Check out http://www.talktalkbusiness.co.uk/solutions/network/

5 Technology Agility Tips

Tip 5 : Be clear on what you want to do

BYOD

Collaboration

Flexible Working

Wi-Fi

On-Line

Mobile

Tip 4 : Speed Up Your Internet

Tip 3 : Review how the cloud can help

Tip 2 : Seriously consider VOIP

Tip 1 : Choose the right supplier

And of course, a bit about TalkTalk Business

POWERING AGILITY

DIRECT INTERNET ACCESSFOR BUSINESSES THAT RELY

ON THE INTERNET

LARGEST UK NEXT GENERATION NETWORK

GREAT COVERAGE

FAST UK SUPPORT

THANK YOU

ANY QUESTIONS?