Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly coming to terms with their larger competitors in the technology race. This is because SMEs are prepared to invest more readily in high-end technology products and adopt new technologies advances faster than their bigger cousins in the business arena.
Larger organisations are more often conservative in their approach to new developments, preferring to wait until new concepts have been marketplace tested and proven before adopting them.
Significantly, this approach has much to do with management style. In the SME arena management teams are younger, often more adventurous and ready to embrace new ideas and take calculated risks.
Larger companies are more traditional and their elderly executives are not easily diverted from a defined path particularly if "early adopter`s risks" are linked to change.
By way of illustration, new developments in the convergence of voice and data technologies - particularly voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) - have been keenly adopted by many SMEs due to benefits such as reduced complexity, lower costs and increased productivity.
SMEs have benefited from VOIP technology as it impacts wireless networking, "hotspots" and other related applications - such as the Mitel Contact Center Solution with the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005.
The combined solution will allow Mitel`s Contact Center Solution to seamlessly integrate its voice, Web-chat, e-mail, and fax routing and queuing capabilities into the powerful real-time collaboration and presence capabilities that Live Communications Server 2005 brings to programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and Microsoft Office Word 2003.
Turning to other technologies, SMEs are now adopting sophisticated data storage and archiving applications in the face of more stringent requirements by regulatory and other bodies for increased data integrity.
And applications such as storage area networks (SANs), which have been priced out of reach of many SMEs for some time, are now more affordable and are increasingly falling within the budgets of smaller companies.
From a staffing perspective, SMEs are also enjoying an advantage over larger companies because their eagerness to address cutting-edge technologies is attracting young engineers keen to get to grips with the latest hardware and software developments - and for whom job security is not high on their priority lists.
Finally, CIOs in SMEs are making the most of the technologies within their grasp because they are able to change company policy and direction almost at will to keep pace with the changing technological landscape.
They are able to meet their companies` business needs more accurately as a result and more accurately position their organisations to tackle market opportunities and achieve growth as a consequence of this freedom.
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