IT costly but crucial

IT can help smaller businesses gain new customers to ride through the recession, according to the latest research for Salesforce.com, states ComputerWeekly.

A survey of 1 000 small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for Salesforce.com, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne, rated finding new customers as the most important issue for smaller businesses.

IT plays a crucial role in helping businesses create new opportunities to sell products and lowers the costs associated with managing customers, but the survey also showed that IT was a bigger expense to SMEs than the cost of running facilities or HR.

HP has updated its hardware and software portfolio for smaller businesses, introducing new storage products, thin clients, printers and virtualisation tools, reports ZDNet.

HP is introducing a bundle for SMEs that want to move into virtualisation, combining HP ProLiant G6 servers with HP storage and networking technology, as well as virtualisation software from HP and VMware.

The bundle provides high availability without the need for external storage, instead allowing companies to turn existing server disc drives into shared storage, HP says.

Visa, the world's largest retail electronic payments network, Al Rajhi Bank and Microsoft have entered into a strategic agreement to provide financial solutions for SMEs that are adopting advanced technology into their business operations, according to Al Bawaba.

Under the agreement, Al Rajhi will introduce a Visa-Microsoft 'Aamal' credit card, which will become the first Visa Microsoft co-branded credit card in Saudi Arabia.

Saeed Al Ghamdi, deputy CEO of Al Rajhi Bank, explained that the bank is issuing the card in order to enhance the operations of SMEs by enabling them to adopt advanced technologies that will help them to keep pace with the rapid growth of the Saudi IT sector.