how to make the new internet work for your business

How to make the new Internet work for your

business

Factors driving Internet impact

• In 2008, 16 million households in Great Britain (65 per cent) had Internet access. (ONS)

• More than nine out of ten connections are via broadband

• Online sales account for 17p in every pound spent in UK

How long could your business last?

71%

The Internet has brought huge benefits for SMBs

• Helped SMBs punch above their weight

• Accelerated communication

• Opened up new markets

If that’s today, what about tomorrow?

Three big trends shaping the Internet

1: generation Y

Generation Y - born after 1980

• Introducing the digital natives– 97% own a computer – 97% have downloaded music and other media

using peer-to-peer file sharing – 94% own a mobile phone – 76% use instant messaging and social

networking sites – 34% use websites as their primary source of

news – 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs – 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a

day/7 days a week

Considerations for your business

• As customers: to reach generation Y, your marketing needs to be effective in the places where they hang out – things like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube

• As employees: to attract the best generation Y talent you need to accommodate their needs in your business– Different expectations of the

workplace– Consumerisation of IT – expect

to be able to use the services they’ve grown up with at work

• HR: raises new issues, e.g. should I limit access to Facebook at work?

CIO magazine advice…

“Support the technology they use in their personal lives. Companies currently struggle with the management and security risks posed by consumer technology entering the workplace. This will intensify as more Generation Y’ers enter the workforce.”

“IT departments need to work out how to accommodate these new technologies, because Generation Y’ers gravitate toward organisations that harness the best information technology and want access to the hardware and software they use in their personal life, whether that is Google Apps, Macs or T-Mobile SideKicks.”

In the next few years…

• Your Gen Y employees may be using personal email for work, blogging, or communicating with clients on Facebook or Twitter

• Bringing their own laptops, webcams etc into the office for work

2: video is everywhere

Growth of web video• Everything changed with

arrival of fast broadband, which we pioneered

• Consumer services popularised use of web for video

• In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views on YouTube

• BBC iPlayer now accounts for 5% of all UK Internet traffic

Business applications of video - external

• Using video on your own website to showcase products

• Explain complex ideas• Webinars / video conferencing with

customers• Seeding to YouTube

Business applications - internal

• Communicate key announcements to staff

• Demonstrate new products, best practice

• Training / videoconferencing

In the next few years…

• Could you use video to better explain and promote your products or services online?

• Could you use web video to improve communication internally?

• Could you cut down on travel costs by using web conferencing?

3: Cloud computing

What it is…

• AKA Software as a Service (SaaS), Hosted Apps, On Demand computing

• Allows businesses to access IT applications and services over the web

• 2,000 businesses signing up to ‘Google Apps’ every week

• 47% of SMBs planning to adopt cloud technology within the next five years

Benefits for your business• Reduces costs – of hardware, licence

and maintenance• Immediacy – instantly deploy the

kind of software you need without complex integration

• Convenience - Lets someone else worry about basic IT issues – e.g. sharing and storing large files

• Mobility - allows you to access your business information from any location or device with web access

• Collaboration – allows people to work in new ways

In the next few years…

• Could you host some business applications into the cloud?

• Could you do away with some of server equipment you have in your office and use the cloud instead?

• Could you encourage more remote working / collaborative working?

These trends put greater demand on

your Internet infrastructure

Things to think about…

• Is my Internet infrastructure designed for 1999 or 2009?

• Can I be sure I have enough speed, reliability, support?

• Can my Internet access scale as my business needs it to?

Speed

• Business-grade not consumer broadband

• Mission-critical applications on the Internet means you need to increase bandwidth

• Upload is as important as download – think about SDSL

Contention ratios

• Just as important as speed is ‘contention’

• With zero contention, no one else shares your bandwidth: it’s like having the highway all to yourself

Support

• 24/7 technical support

• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• Back up options• An ISP that is going

to stick around!

Cultural issues

• Gen Y policies• Remote working

growing and expected

• NGH estimates that there are around one million homeworkers in the UK.

Thinking about a change of ISP?

• 77% of SMBs had been let down by regular service outages and 29% experienced unacceptable connection speeds

• But only one in ten were prepared to switch provider

• Why do we put up with things in business that we wouldn’t tolerate at home?

Conclusions

• The Internet has transformed the world we live in and had major impact on SMBs

• The new Internet offers huge opportunities

• But to take advantage of it, you need to consider if your Internet infrastructure is up to scratch

Further resources