I do not know about you, but I find Microsoft licensing to be confusing.  Here is a summary of Microsoft Open License vs Open Value vs Cloud and other licensing options. Microsoft has three main on-premise license types that are relevant to small business technology procurement  - Volume, OEM and Full Packaged Product.  Within Volume licensing, there are many options, but two are particularly useful for small businesses - Open License and Open Value.  For both types, one must purchase a minimum of 5 licenses.  Finally, there is the Online Subscription which is somewhat difficult to compare directly, but offers a Cloud alternative to on-premise deployments.

Organizations may utilize IT services for small business in many ways, including break-fix, selective managed services and fully outsourced. 

This is a great question that small business owners and IT leaders often pose. In fact, virtualization cost is substantially less, both initially and over time. In one recent example, Turbotek consolidated four servers into one through virtualization. Had the customer refreshed their servers with individual machines for Microsoft SQL Server and their three existing terminal servers, it would have cost them over $50K. With virtualization, it cost them roughly $29K. In addition, they are saving nearly $500 per month on power, cooling and space.  Finally, there are other benefits reviewed in Virtualization And Small Business Benefits - Dollars And Sense that include substantially faster recovery time, potential tax incentives and increased agility, flexibility and efficiency while reducing risk.

Small Business Endpoint Virtualization provides a great way for organizations to increase productivity and reduce costs while minimizing risk and increasing agility.  There are an increasing number of endpoint options that users have from smartphones to tablets and various flavors of PCs.  This gives people the option to be connected when and how they want to.

Turbotek recently published the 2011 Information Technology Optimization guide.  In it, we laid out some of the key business drivers for small businesses for this year and the IT initiatives that are going to help organizations meet their goals.

Small and medium businesses have more options today as it relates to productivity software.  The traditional approach that involves installing Microsoft Office 2010 as an on-premise solution is one alternative.  A new, cloud alternative is Microsoft Office 365 (formerly Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite).

Not only is going green good for the environment, but it can have a lot of great financial and other benefits for your small business.

There are many things to consider when virtualizing - storage requirements, number of users and disaster recovery to name a few.  One thing that should be at the top of the list is security. Small businesses are embracing server, storage and other forms of virtualization as a means of reducing costs, improving efficiency and becoming more agile.  The last post provides a framework for quantifying these benefits.  What about the security of virtualization? Does introducing this new technology make small business IT infrastructure more vulnerable?

We have reviewed virtualization and small business benefits at a high level in Small Business IT Virtualization - A Path To Savings, Storage Virtualization Benefits for Small Business IT and Best Practices in Technology for Small Business in Uncertain Times.  Let's go down a level of abstraction and talk dollars and sense, so to speak.

When I was in the information security business, my customers would say that projects were funded first for compliance, second for the needs of the business and third for what was the right thing to do from an IT perspective.  This led to a lot of over compliance, but it is an interesting lens when thinking about best practices in technology for small business, especially during these times.