A bold new model for businesses Stop Buying Tech If you run a business (or a significant chunk of one) youve noticed something weird happening over the last 5-10 years. thats separate from your main one. Your business has grown a secondary, parallel business As well as being a shoe company or law firm or whatever it is you do, youve had to become something entirely different as wellYouve had to become an IT service provider. To your own business. Youve been forced to invest in all kinds of technology that isnt core to your business. In servers and storage. In hardware and software. In integration services -to make it all work. Youve had to build up and support servers. And put up security layers to protect them, networks to connect them and administrators to keep them up and running. When your vendors issue patches, you get in there and patch. When your operating systems get out of date, you pay to migrate to the newer ones. When trouble pops up, your helpdesk shoots it. All this just to keep your people productive and protected and plugged in. But somewhere along the line, you started to notice something. Your technology tail is wagging your business dog. Youre spending a huge amount of time, money and effort delivering IT services to your people when you could be spending a huge amount of time, money and effort on your people. And your business. And your customers. Its time for this to stop. Its time to stop buying tech. And start buying the outcome. Think about it. Your people arent interested in all the plumbing that brings them the applications they use every day. They just want the applications: the things that help them do their jobs. They dont care about data centers, servers, network operating systems, firmware, virtualization, storage, security or bandwidth. They care about their apps and working better together. . That may sound like a threat to your entire IT operation. Because the lions share of your budget is spent on things your users couldnt care less about. A massive, world-changing, and ultimately hugely liberating opportunity. But really, its an opportunity. The opportunity is this: Stop buying tech. Start buying your IT as a service. Dont invest in a massive infrastructure to deliver what you might (or might not) one day need. Stop over-paying Stop over-provisioning. Pay for exactly what you use, per user, per month. Stop being locked in. If your needs change, change what you buy. Stop building an Iron Empire. You dont need fifty people and millions worth of hardware to let your people use Office or to help your knowledge workers collaborate or let your fleet managers deploy asset tracking Just turn it on. This is here. Now. The vision for utility computing buying IT like you buy electricity has been around for decades. Now its a reality. Thousands of businesses all over the world are getting more and more of their IT and telecom as a service. Its a fundamental change in the way businesses do business and it delivers some profound benefits: You serve the business better. Getting your people the apps they need, faster and with less hassle. Your business gets more agile. Because youre not locked into long-term investments and legacy systems. Your people get more productive. Because youre free to deploy new teamwork apps instead of last generations. Your people get happier too. Getting your people the apps they need, faster and with less hassle. This is a big deal. This is a turning point in the way businesses harness technology. And youre right where you need to be: at the crossroads. So next time your people need to do something new, dont think about servers and software and data center space and network capacity. Think about buying a pay-as-you-go service. With everything included. From somebody nice. For companies with people in them. A bold new model for businesses Stop Buying Tech