The advent of the SME marketplace has signalled a clear and definite shift for the global and local IT industry. And now that the industry "rah-rah" has come and gone, it`s interesting to see who is really delivering on their promises of offering real-life, tailor-made solutions to SMEs.
Probably one of the biggest mistakes made by SME players has been a misconception of smaller business needs. Contrary to popular belief, SMEs need solutions that not only offer reliability and functionality at a cost-sensitive price-point, but also infrastructure that is easily upgradeable.
After all, most SMEs aspire to become larger enterprises one day, and in order to reach this goal they must also have an IT infrastructure that supports this - the last thing they need to worry about is whether their system will be able to handle the influx of transactions and subsequent upgrades. At Computer Associates, for example, we`ve established the CIC Centre in Barcelona, Spain, that looks particularly at the development and effective implementation of the SME solutions.
CA also produced an SME bundle which ties in with Microsoft, bundling our BrightStor ARCserve backup and recovery software to work with their Small Business Server, catering for users of 25, 50 or 75. We`ve already seen phenomenal adoption among the some 12 000 bundles of Microsoft Small Business Server sold locally. To further strengthen this offering, we recently signed a partnership agreement with iOmega which entails the offering of CA`s BrightStor ARCserve Backup and eTrust Anti-Virus software bundled with iOmega`s REV hard drive to run specifically on Microsoft`s Small Business Server.
Through this solution, SMEs now have an enterprise-level backup and recovery solution that enables the reliable and secure backup of data from servers and workstations on a removable hard-drive-based media which is eight times faster than tape backup.
Businesses will also benefit greatly as the solution has a backup agent included for both Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange in the BrightStor ARCserve Backup Small Business Server iOmega Bundle.
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