According to Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and chief executive officer, Invensys Operations Management, "You can't really manage and optimize your operations and achieve top profitability until you connect your business strategy to your production execution."
Bhattacharya should know, as he ranks high at a company that was recently honored as Microsoft Global Enterprise Partner of the Year in the category Alliance ISV Industry.
While Invensys mainly specializes in process in manufacturing, there are definite lessons to be learned here for the SMB space and those who serve them. The key takeaway: Effective technology processes are the crucial middle point between vision and implementation.
Bhattacharya, keynote speaker at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, illustrates the point: "In most plants, the production floor isn't connected to the rest of the enterprise, and that gap is where much of the value is lost," he said. "Consolidating data for planning, scheduling, production and other operation's management tasks on a single platform allows everyone at every level of the enterprise to see and understand how their decisions impact profitability and productivity in real time. And that leads to faster, smarter choices."
The same philosophy holds true whether making hard industrial widgets or cupcakes, and, of course, it extends to services. Easy access to data, customer habits, inventory or service rollout planning should be at one central location or at least connected enough to reach the output point.
MSPs can learn from consulting shops all the way up the channel in that regard. When you integrate any business cycle using effective, storage, backup, network operations and database support, it's less of a headache and a foray to sure success in the best-case scenario.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 11, 20110 comments
One day, it's quite possible that tablets and mobile computing -- to say nothing of cloud technology -- will change the hardware landscape and if organizations are not careful, security could be orphaned along with coherent and cohesive processing environments.
If recent initiatives are any indication, Trend Micro envisions a world where an enterprise or SMB may operate wholly through an iPad and/or Windows phone, while its customers have everything from netbooks to PCs with cloud operating systems. The MSPs challenge will be to integrate all of these disparate computing units and manage an environment where it doesn't seem like any differences actually exist.
A recent poll of "IT decision-makers" by Trend Micro found that 74 percent of organizations already allowed employees to use personal devices, while at the same time about 80 percent of the same respondents said putting critical data on a mobile device makes it far more susceptible to attack and breach.
Trend Micro -- whose own software is compatible with smartphone platforms from Apple iOS, Google Android, Symbian and Windows Phone 7 -- joins others in suggesting console device management platforms as a start for a new world where unmatched devices and apps can still match up with business objectives.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 11, 20110 comments