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Size no longer matters in business. Broadband access and Web hosting services have brought SMB the websites, intranets and other resources previously only affordable to large enterprises. The Internet has leveled the playing field among businesses of all sizes, and approximately 42.7 percent of small businesses are online, according to the Small Business Research Board. These companies represent a new breed of SMBs that derive profit and revenue from the Internet. With a Web-based business, it is no longer essential for the buyer, seller and distributor to be in the same geographic location for them to transact business, and one can expand business hours to 24/7. A website should be easy to use regardless of the user’s level of technical expertise. Websites may be translated into multiple languages to serve an international customer base. In addition to sales through the website, the site may also drive telephone and bricks-and-mortar sales.
With broadband in the home or office, consumers are better able to view videos, high resolution graphics and have an overall better quality of experience online. In turn, businesses can display rotating product images and product data sheets, and offer such enhancements as “Buy Now” icons, promotion codes, cross-selling or “Email to a friend” options. In addition to customer-facing business applications, there are also sell-side applications that enable a company to improve internal business processes and functionality.
The good news is that businesses are increasingly taking advantage of the power of the Web. The bad news is that the website or intranet must be able to handle the traffic, or it will be as useless as roller skates on an interstate highway. A company needs to manage its Web growth as traffic increases, perhaps after a favorable product review or mention elsewhere, which drives traffic to the site. If customers try to access a company’s site and meet up with the ‘World-Wide-Wait,’ they will abandon the visit and a sale may be lost.
Site availability is therefore key to having a successful e-commerce site and is one of the primary functions of an Application Delivery Controller (ADC). Availability includes having ample bandwidth, memory and storage, and also includes redundancy, failover, load balancing and persistence. Small businesses that are not using the Internet are falling behind their competitors who are better connected internally, and have greater availability to their customer base. These new e-commerce companies have the advantage of automation which saves money and frees personnel to do other tasks. There does not need to be someone “on call” to monitor and troubleshoot a website at 3:00AM. The smaller business that does not have an efficient website is losing a window to customers who “let their fingers do the walking via their keyboards.” Imagine a company without a telephone—unthinkable—the modern-day equivalent is a company without a website. A website also saves companies’ customer service time and money. If sales staff is not taking up their time answering questions on the phone, when simple questions can be answered on a website, they will have more time to assist customers with more complicated questions.
In the book, “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman explains that the Year 2000 ushered in the era of Globalization 3.0, in which the world is shrinking and individuals and companies are empowered to compete globally. Through the Internet and other telecommunications technologies, geographic boundaries to communicating and competing are falling, driven in part by the development of global supply chains. Companies are gaining the electronic resources needed to compete with much larger players. There was an old New Yorker cartoon that had a puppy sitting in front of a computer and the caption read, “no one knows I’m a dog on the Internet.” Small businesses can appear to be much larger based on their websites. Naturally, while this level playing field concept is a good one, it also brings challenges to the small business to maintain the resources needed to compete with larger players, and to do so without breaking the budget.
Today’s small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) are undergoing the same IT evolution as their enterprise counterparts, only on a smaller scale. For SMBs, website reliability, flexible scalability, performance and ease of management are as essential to SMB website infrastructure as they are to an enterprise. It’s fair to say that these capabilities are an important operational imperative for businesses of all sizes. SMBs can gain efficiencies and competitive advantages by adopting appropriate networking technologies. However, without the proper systems in place, they will suffer from poor performance and they will be competitively disadvantaged. For this reason, choosing the appropriate application delivery controllers and server load balancing products is critical to ensuring efficient and effective website infrastructure to meet today’s needs, while ensuring the right upgrade path for tomorrow’s business requirements.
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