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Embracing Technology

Business technology money saving tips

To run a successful business, you must ensure your costs are under control. The costs of business technology is no different. Even trying just one or two of the money saving tips below could translate into immediate savings for your bottom line.

1. Ask for a discount from your software vendor. You can't save money on your business technology if you don't ask. Even a 5% discount can add up.

2. Use open source and free products. There is often an open source equivalent for most products on the market. Examples include: 

• Operating systems such as Linux
• Productivity Suites, e.g. OpenOffice
• Reporting, e.g. Pentaho or Jasper
• Document Management e.g Alfresco

These business technology tools often have almost 100% of the features of comparable commercial solutions, but at a fraction of the cost.

3. Use web-based tools with a low or free per user or per usage pricing. Some of these tools are free, such as spreadsheet and word processing applications from Google Apps. For some such as BaseCamp for Project Management you pay a small subscription fee.

4. Volume licensing can provide quite dramatic money savings. Generally, the rule is to not buy software individually if you have more than 5 computers to buy for. It's worth talking to software vendors about your business growth plans and savings potential for bulk purchases.

5. Only pay for what you need. Understand for what purpose you're using a particular software package. Unless you're a power user, don't bother with the Premier or Pro version when the Standard version will suffice.

Here are some money saving tips for reducing the total cost of ownership

Get expert, independent advice when choosing a software solution or having software custom built. Sometimes the cheapest business technology solution isn't always the best and may cost you significantly more in the medium term as an incorrect or flawed solution may need to be re-worked at cost.

Evaluate Hosted solutions for your software. Hosted software solutions are accessed from within your business but are run on servers at your IT provider's data centre. Your IT provider can spread the cost of the staff who undertake the ongoing patching, upgrading and maintenance of servers across all of their clients.

Specialise. A specialist in a particular field of IT is often two to ten times more effective than a generalist. For some products or business systems; even at high-end rates, an expert may be more cost-effective as you are not paying for a generalist's learning curve.

Use a Content Management System (CMS) if you have text, features or ads which regularly change on your website. For example, you shouldn't be paying for web-developer time to add new products to catalogues, release company news or add newsletters and blogs.

Backup your data. Do it regularly and do it off-site. Having data backed up means your business will survive even if your computers or business premises do not. A forensic recovery of your business data off a damaged hard drive can be up to ten to twenty times the cost of replacing the hard drive itself. Remember a mantra I use: hard drives are cheap; data is expensive.