Small & Medium Business

You may have been reading about our 10 finalists of the Dell/NFIB Small Business Excellence Award which we have been sharing.  I hope you have been as inspired by some of these stories as I was.  We actually had two finalists from Alabama, and I’m excited to introduce our next finalist, Geo-Source from Florence, Alabama.

Geo-source has a very interesting business. They perform environmental assessment services for large timberland acquisitions being considered by institutional investors.  As their founder Brad Dethero tells it, Geo-source has carved out a unique space for themselves. They are not a large engineering firm, or a forestry firm, or an environmental engineering firm. They have been successful by focusing on services that timberland investment management organizations (or TIMOs) need.

I really liked two entrepreneurial parts of the Geo-source story.  Brad founded the company after being laid off from a plant twice and decided he’d rather be in charge of his own destiny.  Even better, Brad tells us that they are one of the few companies not affected by the current recession, in fact, they have been busier than ever.

Let’s talk about what the team at Geo-source actually does.  They are often tasked to assess tracts of hundreds of thousands of acres and advise potential investors of any environmental considerations.  What that means is that most of their work happens in the air – from helicopters to be precise. They conduct aerial reconnaissance of the tracts being considered and photograph everything with a camera that is interfaced with a computer.  Each photo document then has a GPS location stamp automatically created.

What these experts are looking for is any number of things from spotting current and old mining sites, to finding illegal trash dumping to identifying areas with environmental sensitivity – either because of the land or wildlife habitat.  They even identify hunting sites for customers, showing just how detail oriented they are.  As an example they are evaluating forest land right now in Washington State and are able to show potential investors where spotted owl habitats are.

Before this technology set up, at one time they would literally walk to different parts of the track armed only with pads of paper, GPS locators and cameras.  The cumbersome progress depended on sketching maps, making assessments, then developing film, and matching pictures back up to written pages and then work with a computer database to give their clients the reports they need.

Now their system of real time encoding of digital photos means they can turn around assessments for clients much faster.  And it’s reduced their costs dramatically, not only from report processing but from not needing to rent as much air time in the helicopters.  Today they are working across the country and offering customers competitive bids and high satisfaction thanks to their use of technology.

Congratulations to Geo-source!

Anyone paying attention to the current state of politics in the United States knows that healthcare reform is driving much of the discussion in Washington. No question it's a hugely complex issue that can be improved on a number of fronts. One area where our teams think much progress can be made is in the use of electronic medical records.

Right now, less than 10 percent of U.S. physicians have fully-functional EMR systems in place. The reason that's still a reality is that such systems have been costly and very complex to set up. With the solution we're introducing in the United States today, we're working to change that.

Dell's Affiliated Physician EMR Solution is designed for hospitals that want to implement EMR for their affiliated physicians that is compatible with their own information systems and for physicians  and enterprise-quality EMR support for their small practices. It enables hospitals and practices that share patients to share patient information electronically.

Our teams worked to create a modular, enterprise-class EMR solution that sponsor hospitals can configure to meet the needs of their affiliated physician community. It includes application hosting by the hospital, the software provider or Perot Systems and Health Information Exchange management by the hospital or Perot Systems. It also includes everything necessary to promote the solution to physicians.

What benefits does automating medical records mean to you as an individual? More automation will translate into lower costs and will provide real-time access to your information to simplify registration, scheduling and billing when medical issues do arise.

If you want to learn more about it, watch this vlog from Jamie Coffin, head of our healthcare team, where he describes the new solution. Also, check out Dell.com/EMR for more details.

Over the past several months, Dell has shared a lot about how the new 11G enterprise products and services help businesses run more efficiently - and today a new full line of solutions are added to help growing businesses achieve greater IT efficiency and lower costs. For small and medium businesses, this means having IT solutions that are easy to operate (reducing costs), reliable by eliminating downtime, and are secure with enhanced data protection.

I connected with a couple of our customers (business profiles below) to find out how technology solutions can benefit SMBs and help them grow their businesses.

Authenticom Inc. - Authenticom is a "one stop shop" for all data integrity.  With a special ability to poll, cleanse, data append, and push data, clients have the most optimal up-to-date customer data possible.  Authenticom can seamlessly update and append data back into the client's data management systems or into just about any third party application. 

Milestone Consulting Group - Milestone provides consulting services around the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management suite, mostly to Fortune 500 companies. Milestone helps businesses make sure that their human resources are working on the most effective and important projects for their organization. The consulting services teach companies how to best identify, estimate, and prioritize work -- along with best practices for planning, tracking, and executing projects.

Here are some of the highlights from what the two Dell customers, Craig Rhodes of Authenticom Inc. and Brandon Thornton of Milestone Consulting Group, had to say:

Simplifying technology with Dell

Craig: Authenticom is a database intensive company. Because of the company's nature, it is imperative that data is available 24X7 with the necessary velocity to achieve our demand for speed and accessibility. The IT Assistant and soon to be Dell Management Console allow us to maintain our 120+ servers by alerting and upgrading all aspects of the servers.  The ability to schedule BIOS, Firmware and Drivers on the servers frees up our Server Administrators time to work on "real" issues.  Now with the Management Console, we will be able to do server trending and have the ability to automate the querying of Dell's web site to report on warranty expirations for budgetary purposes.

Brandon: There are really three things that have helped us a lot.  We're a small company and we like to focus on doing business with our customers, not on technology.  One of the key components of Dell's technology has been in the realm of server manageability, that being remote access to our servers.  On average, we probably visit the data center maybe once a month -- made possible by Dell's OpenManage suite. Secondly, ProSupport for IT has been extremely helpful for us since we have a highly geographically dispersed centralized workforce. With Dell's support, we don't have to employ anybody internally to support our deployed laptop base. Finally, integrated cellular cards have provided all of our employees wireless broadband in their Latitudes so they can easily access the Internet at customer sites.

Driving Efficiency

Craig: For us, building a server from scratch would usually take 3 to 4 hours from start to finish.  With the Dell Open Management tools automation, we just kick of the initial install and work on other projects while the install takes place. This saves us countless time not having to downloading drivers and waiting to hit the F6 key to load raid drivers.

Brandon: Email (Microsoft Exchange) is one of our very most important systems.  In our first two years in business, our email uptime was around 98 percent, which I suppose maybe wasn't bad. But, if you had asked people in the company, they'd say it was really bad.  Last year we put our mail servers on the PowerEdge 2950 platform, and migrated to Exchange 2007. After that, we had five minutes of total downtime that year for our mail system.  This was a tremendous improvement in our reliability of the email system when it comes to efficiency and labor costs.

Data Protection

Craig: I should knock on wood, but honestly in my past 12 years that I have been working with Dell equipment I have never had a catastrophe happen.  Oh sure, we've had a couple of times where a server dropped because of a raid controller going bad, but with the way Dell systems work it is very easy to install a new controller and have the system come back online fairly quickly.

Brandon: We've had some fairly good fortune about data protection. However, Dell has helped us get something done with our data that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do.  For one of our large clients we wanted to virtualize our training environment, but we weren't sure we were ready to invest the money. The time frame was extremely short, basically two weeks to put the whole thing together.  Our account team did a tremendous job of pulling everything together for us, helping us get the specifications for this environment right and getting the hardware to us in the space of about a week.  For a smaller business to get that kind of support from Dell really helped our business do something we'd never done before.

According to analyst firm IDC, there are 72 million small to mid-sized business in operation and the ICSB projects that more than 500 million will set up shop over the next five years. That’s a staggering number of companies with incredibly diverse business models and IT needs. What these companies have in common is the need to run their business efficiently with technology that is simple to use, reliable and secure. That’s where Dell comes in.

In March we announced our first wave of new products and services designed to bring efficiency to enterprise computing, and on June 17 we introduced additional products and services to drive IT efficiency  in the data center and beyond. Today, we’re building on those announcements with new line of solutions designed to help medium and small businesses achieve greater IT efficiency and lower costs. The new portfolio includes:

• Four 11th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers
• Lifecycle Controller 1.2 embedded systems management
• PowerVault NX300 network attached storage (NAS) device
• Dell Uninterruptible Power Supplies
• Dell ProConsult services
• All available through Dell or any of the company’s more than 50,000 Global PartnerDirect Channel Partners.

Simple, Reliable and Secure Technology:

People don’t go into business to become IT experts, and they shouldn’t have to be experts to operate systems that help them work efficiently. Technology should just work so you don’t have to worry about it. Your data needs to be safe and there when you need it.

Simple: making technology simple means giving people time back to focus on growing their business. Here is how Dell is doing just that:

• Dell Lifecycle Controller 1.2, simplifies the set-up of new server platforms by automating the operating system installation and saves time by including the right drivers for all the operating systems and components are already on Dell PowerEdge servers so you don’t have to load software from a bunch of CDs.
• The new Dell PowerEdge servers T110 and T310 tower servers and the R210 and R510 rack servers are idea for small businesses, with compact chassis that fit in tight spaces and the right combination of security, basic systems management for easy system monitoring and reliability.
• These servers are equipped with the new Intel Xeon 3400 series processor for the performance necessary to run business workloads with the Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating system. The updated OS has enhanced virtualization capabilities with Hyper-V™ with live migration capabilities to easily move virtual machines from one server to another.
• The Dell PowerVault NX300 network attach storage includes Single-Instant Storage deduplication technology to maximize capacity and an intuitive management interface to help deploy in 15 minutes or less. Read more about it in this post by @jgargis.

Reliable: making solutions reliable means keeping all systems and employees productive to get the most out of your IT spend.

• Dell PowerEdge servers come equipped with rugged chassis, solid design, metal hard drive carriers and components to withstand all IT environments and reduce downtime.
• New Dell Uninterruptible Power Supplies provide vital power backup for your IT equipment to reduce down time and protect your data. Read more about Dell UPS on Inside Enterprise IT.

Secure: protecting technology means making sure that a company’s data is always available, especially when it’s needed. Dell provides security features, data storage and support services for data protection, data back-up and recovery to ensure business continuity and to help businesses operate efficiently.

• Dell PowerEdge servers ensure data is protected and readily available with full redundancy and cost effective RAID options that help to prevent data loss by further protecting the way your data is stored on your internal hard drives.
• The PowerEdge T110 tower server and R210 rack server offer the ability to add external eSATA storage directly to ease the transition of data from a desktop or workstation to a first server.
• Dell ProSupport Data Protection Services such as Hard Drive Data Recovery and Certified Data Destruction help organizations protect their business operations by protecting their data through risk mitigation and improved data security.

Antonio Julio, global enterprise director for Dell's Small and Medium Business group, tells us more about the new products and services in this video.

We are excited to introduce new technology to help people do their jobs more efficiently. Read how we’ve made work more efficient for these customers. We’re looking forward to hearing how Dell has helped you. Tell us your story.

I hope you have been following the posts about the 10 finalists of the Dell/NFIB Small Business Excellence Award.  There are some really interesting stories of small businesses using technology to their advantage, which I think you will enjoy.  The next finalist we’d like to introduce is Appleton Learning from Madison, Alabama.

This company calls itself the “e-harmony of tutoring” and that’s a great description of how they make technology work for them. They specialize in tutoring and test preparation services. That’s actually a relatively crowded market and Appleton is competing with both regional and national companies that offer similar services. The five person company was started about four and a half years ago, out of a college dorm room, but we promise that’s not why Dell voted for them.

What makes Appleton unique, and helped make them a finalist in this competition, is that they use software to match students and tutors based on the human elements of education.  They have become the number one tutoring service in their local market by using technology tools that not only make their business more efficient but also make it easier for customers to do business with them.  In fact, they doubled revenues between 2007 and 2008 and are on track for similar growth this year!

Glenn Clayton, Appleton’s president, told us about starting his business.  He tutored while in high school but didn’t have time when he got to college.  What he did have time for was matching up his friends who wanted to tutor with students who needed tutoring, and the rest as they say is history.

What Appleton has developed is a totally customized web-based software system called the Appleton Resource Management System or ARMS.  The system allows them to match tutors to students on a number of criteria as well as tracking tutoring schedules and keep track of tutoring histories and payments.

This model doesn’t require students to come to a traditional tutoring center, rather tutors and students work out their own schedule.  What that means is they have to process a much higher volume of business than traditional centers, but provide a high level of service to each customer.  That also means their ARMS system must keep track of an enormous amount of data, and it’s doing so rather well.

Since the company was founded, and they evolved into this new business model, they have tried many different marketing techniques to attract new customers but report most of their growth has come from good relationships they have built with schools and word of mouth from satisfied customers.

Congratulations to Appleton Learning, and good luck!