Customers:
Businesses could improve their profits 25 percent by reducing customer defections by just five percent, according to the Harvard Business Review. Retaining customers through better customer experience, having customer data easily accessible and understanding the customer’s business is essential. Analyzing customer needs by utilizing the data within a company can help to win more customers and provide valuable insight into behavior and buying patterns of existing customers.

Complexity:
All companies, including those in the small to mid-sized range, are tasked with managing multiple applications, coping with interoperability issues and user training on new systems. Alongside this IT departments are faced with the requirement to be able to store and access data formats ranging from text to video across a myriad of systems.

Compliance:
Similar to larger enterprises, small to mid-sized companies are subject to data protection and data storage compliance laws, and yet find it challenging to deal with the maze of rules and regulations. Securing and setting compliance policies is a continual headache for these companies, who live in fear of a serious security breach, data theft and malware attacks on the systems.

Costs:
Small to mid-sized businesses rely on their data as much as larger enterprises and yet most often have much smaller or sometimes non-existent IT departments to manage this data. In the current economic climate lowering costs is a top priority, and thus, all companies but especially small and medium-sized businesses are trying to reduce IT spend, while maintaining, or even improving level of service. The need for IT departments to multitask at every opportunity; reducing management time on multiple systems is crucial.

• Aviation Technology Group - Aviation Company Uses PLM Suite to Improve Collaboration and Internal Operations "By utilizing the Microsoft SQL Server version of UGS Teamcenter, we actually saved approximately $20,000 in hardware and software costs during our initial implementation. We also reduced our total cost of ownership by minimizing the amount of IT training and staff that we need to support multiple database platforms," Chris Ray, IT Director at ATG, explains, adding: "The cost of the solution was much less than some of the competitors and the tools allowed us to quickly adapt to the system and be able to support it in production. The enhanced functionality and features available in Microsoft products allowed us to do more with less, which is important to a company like ours."
• Ste. Michelle Wine Estates - Vintner Gains Faster Access to Business Data for More Profitable Decision Making Ste. Michelle put the Microsoft Business Intelligence solution into production for just half the cost of most of the alternatives that it considered, representing a savings of U.S.$100,000 in the first year, according to Joe Gregg, IT Director for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. He attributes the savings to several factors. "The Microsoft Business Intelligence solution was a natural extension to our Microsoft-based environment, so integration was easy and we were able to take advantage of much of the software—such as SQL Server and Visio—that we already had," says Gregg. "We didn’t have to throw out our existing database components, as we would have had to do with an Oracle-based solution. And while some solutions looked cost-effective for initial deployment, they would have become much more expensive as we scaled to support more users. The Microsoft solution will remain price competitive even as we add dashboards and users across the country."

The full Microsoft Application Platform including BizTalk Server and Visual Studio. This set of technologies integrate seamlessly to offer a mission-critical integration, development and data platform for all applications across the organisation

If you buy software 'off the shelf', known as Full Packaged Product (FPP), this is oriented to retail purchases for consumers or small business's.

Any business looking to purchase more than five licences should consider a Volume Licensing agreement. Please contact our software/licence team to receive a quotation today! SQL Server 2008 licences are available as 'per processor' or on the Server + CAL model.