Top 10 Reasons for Using a Client Relationship Manangement (CRM) System

If your company is not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software or a CRM system, then you are probably missing a good opportunity to increase revenues and reduce costs.

There are numerous benefits to properly implementing CRM software and I have gone through several web site and compiled information into a top 10 list.

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Use CRM Software:

1. Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales representative - That's $410,000 additional on every $1M in quota.
2. Decrease sales cycles by over 24% - If you average sale takes 4 months, this is like adding 1 additional sale per year.
3. Lead conversion rate improvements by over 300%
4. Increase customer retention improvements by 27% - This can have a significant impact on adding to the bottom line - less costly to maintain a current client then to get a new one.
5. Decrease sales and marketing costs by 23% - Huge impact on the overall performance of a company.
6. Improve profit margins by over 2% - This also has a significant impact on the overall performance of a company.
7. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%
8. 65% of a businesses revenue is generated by loyal repeat clients - Understand what clients are your best clients and get to know them and their spending habits - Upsell them!!!
9. 80% of sales leads are lost, ignored or discarded - Just because someone didn't buy in the past doesn't mean that they are not interested today - Follow up.
10. 73% of organizations have no process to requalifying or revisting business leads - Gain business that you didn't have before.

An interesting piece of information that IDC reported is that ROI from CRM is between 16% and 1000% and that half of all companies surveyed see between 50% and 500% on ROI.

The whole concept behind these figures is that you adhere to a process to manage sales and by managing this process, the benefits will follow. Key to making a CRM system work is to understand what you want to accomplish and implement CRM to meet your goals. Over 50% of all CRM implementations are deemed to be a failure due to the fact that there was not a proper implementation to meet the objectives that were desired. So just implementing CRM alone is not the answer. Determining what you want to accomplish and mapping it out is where you want to start.

If you would like to understand how Avanade can help you leverage the power of CRM for your organization, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com .

Avanade offers a hosted model in addition to a client server model.

Windows 7 Upgrades Creates Up to 15% Reduction in TCO - Putting Money Back In Your Pockets

If you work for a company contemplating upgrading your desktops from older versions of Windows to Windows 7, there is a way to offset the cost associated with the upgrade and pay for the upgrade out of operational savings. These savings could add up to over $700/year per desktop image.

Avanade Inc. has a method that will assist companies with paying for their Windows 7 deployment through cost savings. The cost savings are derived from creating a Definitive Software Library (DSL) and truing up software licensing.

Avanade Inc.'s process is called ACA Accelerate and it allows organizations to understand what software their company currently owns, how many users and what versions the company is running. This creates a current state software list and Avanade uses this information to model a future state which will typically drive approximately a $400 per desktop in software savings.

A typical desktop environment cost $5000/year to maintain according to Gartner. Software typically costs about 25% or $1,250 of the desktop expenses. Through a rationalization process, a company can usually reduce redundant or unused software between 25% to 33% of the overall software costs, which would produce savings between $312 per desktop and $412 per desktop.

In addition to these savings, Microsoft has come up with a total cost of ownership reduction figure of approximately $155 by using Windows 7. If you were to add Application Virtualization into the equation, then there is approximately another $155 cost savings. By adding these TCO reductions with the savings from using ACA Accelerate to create a Definitive Software Library, this can provide over $700 per desktop in savings. At most, your desktop migration to Windows 7 shouldn't cost more than $350/desktop and that would be at the high end with a lot of hand holding and white gloves involved.

Example of a TCO Reduction For a 5,000 Desktop Company :

As an example, if your company were to have 5000 desktop images, your approximate yearly cost to manage that environment would be $25,000,000 ($5,000 per desktop time 5000 desktops). By utilizing Avanade's ACA Accerate service to derive $400/desktop in savings while creating a Definitive Software Library, your savings would be $2,000,000 in the first year and then adding the savings, $310 per desktop, that can be had by efficiency gains from upgrading to Windows 7, that would add another $1,550,000 in savings yearly savings.

So for this company, if they didn't upgrade to Windows 7 from their current Windows Platform, they would spend $25M/year on their desktop environment. By using ACA Accelerate to rationalize applications and then upgrading to Windows 7, the annual desktop costs would be $23M with savings of $2M and by utilizing Application Virtualization, the total costs of the desktop environment would be $21.45M which would drive savings of $3.55M or over 14%. Over a 5 year period, this would provide over $17M in savings for your organization.

	Cumulative Costs	With Windows 7 Savings and ACA Accelerat Savings	Cumulative Savings	Percent Annual Savings
Year1	$25,000,000	$21,450,000	$3,550,000	14%
Year2	$50,000,000	$42,900,000	$7,100,000	14%
Year3	$75,000,000	$64,350,000	$10,650,000	14%
Year4	$100,000,000	$85,800,000	$14,200,000	14%
Year5	$125,000,000	$107,250,000	$17,750,000	14%
Total Savings:		$17,750,000

This chart shows the cumulative costs associated with not going to Windows 7 in Blue.

The Red in the chart show the cumulative effects of using savings from ACA Accelerate and the potential savings from Windows 7.

If you are contemplating a Windows 7 Upgrade, you owe it to your company to contact Avanade to see how you can reduce your overall cost and either pay for all or a large portion of you upgrade. Avanade Inc. will provide and initial assessment free of charge for Calgary based businesses if you contact us at 403-476-1473.

If you would like to understand how ACA Accelerate can help you can reduce your Windows 7 implementation in Western Canada or for that matter, anywhere in the world, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Dynamics CRM - Simple Statistics That Can Help Increase Sales

Increasing Sales and retaining clients are typically top priorities for sales departments of most companies. If you are fortunate enough to use a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system, then you may already experience the added sales and client retention benefits that a CRM system can bring to your organization.

If you are looking at implementing a CRM, you should look at the efficiencies that can be gained. Some of the major benefits that CRM can bring to your organization include:

• Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales person
• Decreased sales cycles of over 24%
• Lead conversion rate improvements of over 300%
• Customer Retention improvements of 27%
• Decreased sales and marketing costs of 23%
• Improved profit margins of over 2%

These figures typically are achieved only if you implement a CRM system properly and wrap and embrace the process change that comes with it.

ROI Example:

In order to show how a proper CRM implementation will help a company, I will use and example of a company with $100M/year in revenue with 10% Gross Margins or $10M in profit, and 15% of total revenues are cost of sales or $15M. We will assume a company this size will have 20 seats of CRM and using a potential cost of $3,000 for a first year cost, which includes installation and software (assuming a Dynamics CRM implementation). The first year costs for CRM is $60,000.

Using this example above and looking at the parameters of Decrease in Sales Costs and Increases in Gross Margins, then the following results could be expected:

1. Decreased Sales and Marketing Costs:

With a 23% reduction in sales and marketing costs applied against a 15% cost of sales on total revenue of $100M would be equal to $3.45M in cost reduction.

2. Improved Margins:

With an average of 2% increase in margins, this would mean on the example, 2% on $100M would be $2M. Another way to look at the gross margin increases would be to understand how many additional sales you would need to achieve this figure. In this case, it would be equal to selling an additional $20M in revenue (10% GM percentage on $20M is $2M in GM).

These two parameters added together would potentially be worth $5.45M in value.

One factor that isn't included in these figures would be the client retention number, which could be 27% (on average) of a potential client lose. Unfortunately I cannot find any figures to give exact numbers on client lose per year, but if you use 10% and you can maintain 27% of that number then this would be worth $2.7M in this example.

Although this is a fictitious example, it is there to show the power of a positive ROI on a CRM implementation. An investment of $60,000 is has a return of 9,083%.

As can be seen by this example, embracing a methodology and utilizing a CRM system properly will more than pay off and have a significant ROI.

If you would like to learn more on how CRM can help your organization increase sales, boost profits and margins and retain clients, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade Inc. at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or by phone at 403-476-1473.

4 readily available processes that reduce your IT Project spend by up to 50% or greater

Are you aware that there are four readily available and often overlooked processes that IT organizations can follow that can potentially reduce an IT spend by up to 50% or greater.

These processes are available in a discussion document that I have put together for review.

Each of the processes individually will provide at least a 5% cost savings, but any of these in conjunction with each other gain synergies.


The processes are as follows:

Process One: Underutilized government program that can add up to 30% savings on IT projects.

Process Two: Rarely accessed procurement service that can reduce hardware and software spend by up to 20%.

Process Three: A community effect that reduce the cost of projects at least 10% and potentially allow for the savings to self fund the entire project.

Process Four: Access to cost cutting measures on labor that can save up to 70% on labor costs.

If you would like to understand how these processes can be accessed and how you can reduce your overall IT project spend, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

How to save up to 35% on your IT projects

IT projects for corporations are typically expensive undertakings often costing multi-millions of dollars.

There is a way to potentially reduce the overall costs of your IT projects done in Canada by up to 35% through the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program run by the Canadian Revenue Agency.

The basics of the program are as follow:

Who qualifies?

“Generally, a Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC) can earn an investment tax credit (ITC) of 35% up to the first $2 million of qualified expenditures for SR&ED carried out in Canada, and 20% on any excess amount. Other Canadian corporations, proprietorships, partnerships, and trusts can earn an ITC of 20% of qualified expenditures for SR&ED carried out in Canada”. CRA

What kind of Project qualifies?

Work that qualifies for SR&ED tax credits includes (from the CRA SRED website):
experimental development to achieve technological advancement to create new materials, devices, products, or processes, or improve existing ones;

applied research to advance scientific knowledge with a specific practical application in view;

basic research to advance scientific knowledge without a specific practical application in view; and

support work in engineering, design, operations research, mathematical analysis, computer programming, data collection, testing, or psychological research, but only if the work is commensurate with, and directly supports, the eligible experimental development, or applied or basic research.


IT Project Example:

The following example compares both a private company and a public company with a $5M IT project that has $3M in qualified expenditures for SRED Credits.

Private Company

IT Project is $5M
Qualified Expenditures: $3M
SRED Credits: $900K (35% of the first $2M and 20% of the next $1M)
Potential Project Cost with SRED credits: $4.1M
Savings: $900K
Percent Savings: 18%

Public Company:

IT Project is $5M
Qualified Expenditures: $3M
SRED Credits: $$600K (20% of $3M)
Potential Project Cost with SRED credits: $4.4M
Savings: $600K
Percent Savings: 12%

As can be seen, SRED credits have a tremendous impact on the overall costs of IT projects. Basically, in this day and age, if you are not exploring ways to reduce your overall project costs, you are doing your company a disservice.

Rules change all the time and you should consult the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website to see what they are:

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/bts-eng.html

Avanade in Calgary can assist you in any of your IT projects and help you offset the costs by assisting you with navigating the SRED program.

If you would like to find out more on how to potentially reduce your IT projects, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

VB6 Migration - Moving Mission Critial Application off VB6

There are numerous companies that are still unaware that they may have VB6 applications that are running mission critical processes. A major concern is that VB6 is no longer supported and could put your company in jeopardy, especially if you are running applications that roll up into financials.

With proactive IT investments delayed due to economic challenges,organizations like yours are beginning to outgrow their legacy Microsoft Visual Basic applications and must increasingly dedicate resources to keep these systems running. By migrating Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier applications to the .NET platform, your company can achieve a highly scalable, extremely reliable foundation for mission-critical applications and realize substantial maintenance-related savings.

Gain competitive advantage by updating your applications:

In order to be successful, your Visual Basic applications must evolve with your organization’s ever-changing business needs.

- Do you have a clear picture of the benefits and costs of migrating your applications to .NET and how to remain competitive during migration?
- Do your current Visual Basic applications meet minimum performance, stability,and enterprise-scalability requirements?
- Are you concerned about security vulnerabilities in your older applications?G Can your legacy applications meet current business standards and easily adapt to new industry regulations and legislation?
- Do you have a Visual Basic application performing critical business activity that needs new functionality and are struggling with the best approach for implementing that functionality?

Migrate to Microsoft .NET and maximize your IT investments Migration to the .NET:

Framework is essential for applications that will continue to be important to your organization. Aligning your future IT strategies with .NET through languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C# will enable you to take full advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft technologies. The .NET Frame work presents an outstanding opportunity to increase developer productivity and stability for your organization’s most critical applications.

- Improve the scalability, performance, stability, and security of your Visual Basic applications.G Shorten development time and reduce risk by utilizing existing code and taking advantage of tools to automate code conversion.
- Leverage your investments in supporting infrastructure areas of the Microsoft environment, including IDE and developer tools licensing, build and test environments, and technical resources
- Gain competitive advantage by creating new, lower-cost applications and modifying your existing applications to allow for future growth and agility, while remaining competitive during migration.
- Take full advantage of open standards and new technologies such as XML, Web services, and smart clients, while moving toward Service-Oriented Architecture.
- Reduce your long-term maintenance-related expenses and build on existing support and vendor relationships.

A proven migration methodology:

When it comes to the Microsoft enterprise platform, Avanade has the deep product knowledge and real-world experience that customers demand. Avanade offers a proven migration methodology, including a full Application Migration Assessment, to ensure that organizations get the most value from their Visual Basic-based applications.

- Avanade Application Development Workshop In a two- to five-day workshop, Avanade reviews your organization’s development capabilities and challenges to identify and prioritize the applications most in need of improvement and offer recommendations to take advantage of new technologies. A gap analysis of your organization’s capabilities is incorporated into an action plan that supports your priority application migration opportunities and closes any capability gaps.
- Avanade Application Analysis In a formal one- to three-week process, Avanade examines your existing applications to determine how your organization can benefit from migration to .NET technologies, including reviews of infrastructure platform, technical architecture, application architecture, and application functionality.
- Avanade Application Proof of Concept As the final step in the assessment process, Avanade can build a prototype application to demonstrate the migration process and benefits.

Based on the results of the assessment and proof of concept, Avanade will provide a complete migration plan, including an estimated timeline,detailed project plan, and complete set of deliverables to jump start the creation of your next-generation business applications.

Reduce costs through strategic global delivery:

As a true global services company, Avanade has a worldwide presence and proven delivery record. Our global network of delivery centers in over 30 locations, including India, offers customers the benefit of multi site delivery. Offshore resources, highly trained in Avanade assets,architectures, best practices, and our comprehensive delivery methodology,provide accelerated development of solutions. Our strategic global delivery approach to application migrations allows companies to take advantage of the right combination of onshore, nearshore, and offshore options, resulting in increased productivity and cost-effective solutions development.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

Dashboards for The Oil and Gas Industry

Recently Avanade in Calgary has been working on a quick dashboarding solution that is geared towards the oil and gas industry.

One of the issues that a lot of oil and gas or E&P companies face are the disparate systems that contains data that is relevant to providing meaningful information that should be correlated and used to getting your job done.

A couple of our local Architects have created a quick dsahboarding solution that is specific for E&P's to provide quick visibility into key performance indicators (KPI's) that they measure, such as production growth, capex spend to budget, output per dollar spent on a project or project type, among others.

This solution is utilizing SharePoint, XL Services and Silverlight and can typically be implemented in days as opposed to weeks or months for other dashboarding solutions. Most organizations already own this infrastructure, so deployment is usually quick and inexpensive.

One of the primary uses for this solution is in small divisions or departments of E&P's. For example, a regional division of an oil company may require a dashboard that show their daily production digits. They can benchmark if their numbers against what is required and if a problem occurs where production is lower, then they can drill down to spot the problem.

This solution can be extended to many different areas in an oil and gas company and any information that is contained in a system can be displayed on it's own or correlated with other information.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

Next Generation Workplace

It is estimated that up to 45% of the current workforce are Knowledge Workers (KW) and that by 2012, there will be a 6 million person gap between the supply and demand for Knowledge Workers.

There will be a tremendous strain on how your Knowledge Workers will access information and there are several time sinks that IDC has identified as having a significant impact on organizations that is wasting on average $30,000 in time of Knowledge Workers time per year.

IDC - * The Hidden Costs of Information Work, IDC – April 2006

1. Reformatting into one document - 3.8 hours per week - $5,701/year
2. Search but not find - 3.5 hours per week - $5,251/year
3. Recreating content - 3.0 hours per week - $4,501/year
4. Multichannel publishing with multiple applications - 2.8 hours per week - $4,201/year
5. Moving documents from one format to another - 2.4 hours per week - $3,600/year
6. Acquiring archived records with little or no automation - 2.3 hours per week - $3,450/year
7. Version control issues - 2.2 hours per week - $3,300/year
and more …

Total: $30,000 + / worker / year

Extrapolate (400 person company) - $12,000,000 / year

Avanade Inc., a global IT consultancy joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, has worked on a solution to this issue with our parent companies called The Next Generation Workplace.

THE NEXT GENERATION WORKPLACE (NGWP):
When it comes to communication and collaboration, the way we work and the technology that empowers us has changed dramatically. What was leading edge and made sense 7-8 years ago is now of limited value. As blogs, wikis, video calls, instant messaging, shared workspace and other social networking tools become popular inside the corporation, employees are building cost-effective communities of knowledge that enable them to share information more efficiently and simplify knowledge transfer—but managing costs and security has become a priority, requiring a more controlled and centralized infrastructure, while compliance is becoming critical for tracking mechanisms.

Business Landscape:
In increasingly service-based economies, information is the vital asset- communication and collaboration is the engine that generates value from this asset. Information technology is essential to enable enterprises to build a collaborative environment for competitive advantage and business success. Specifically, digital collaboration—the use of technologies to allow efficient and valuable connections among people and information—is critical to becoming an innovative company, to establishing high-value relationships with customers, partners, suppliers, and stakeholders; to attracting and retaining a highly skilled workforce; and to achieving high-performance operations.

In order for companies to realize the full potential of digital collaboration, IT departments will need to provide new service offerings and take a holistic and proactive view to enable companies with technology to meet their needs now and well into the future. What was once a perfect fit may no longer meet your business needs due to rapid changes in how people work together and what technology can now enable.

Are you seeing a lack of responsiveness among your employees? Issues with an increasingly virtual workplace? Compliance problems? Workers constantly reinventing the wheel? Sales force not connected to your organization knowledge base (people and assets) when they are on the road? Need to share information between customers, partners, and suppliers in a fully secure environment? If you answered ‘yes’ to some of these questions, maybe it is time to rethink your Business Productivity platform.

The Solution:
With the recent releases of a series of Microsoft products, it is now much easier to get people sharing information, connected to each other and turn the corporate, external and team information into strategic assets. A dynamic IT infrastructure is a critical foundation for businesses as it can really empower the information workers to be more productive, more knowledgeable and more connected. In order to illustrate the benefits of digital collaboration, Avanade has built a business illustration which demonstrates what could be the next generation workplace for workers who deal with co-workers, customers, suppliers and providers.

This business illustration is based on various business situations borrowed from the real life:

• Unified Communication: presence-based capability delivering seamless integrated communications for e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging (IM), telephony, voicemail and web conferencing.
• Enterprise Content Management: capability to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes
• Collaborative Workspaces: bringing real-time solutions to current day-to-day collaboration challenges
• Enterprise Search: accessing the right information/people at the right time regardless of the format (structured/non structured), the source (documents repository, LOB, emails, software package, etc) and the location (PC, intranet, internet)
• Knowledge Governance and Control: information policy management ( documents, email, voicemail, etc)- access control, auditing, retention and workflow
• User Self-Service and Dynamic Provisioning: ability for a worker to dynamically perform resource provision (applications, printer queues, e-support etc) as and when they require them
• Performance Workspace: shows the evolution of web portals into actual performance workspaces where user’s roles are taken in account. This presents the user with relevant information, processes and applications, as well as connectivity to other collaborative tools such as live meeting
• Dynamic Workplace: enabling connectivity from any device anywhere to the Enterprise Network

The Technology Used:
The Next Generation Workplace centre of excellence is NOT a futurist environment. It is based on current Microsoft product and could be implemented today. The Microsoft software and Avanade assets used are :

· Microsoft Vista and XP
· Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007
· Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007
· Microsoft Exchange 2007
· Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP2
· Windows Server 2003 Rights Management Services
· Microsoft Office Live Meeting
· Microsoft Groove Client 2007
· Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
· Microsoft Office 2007
· Microsoft SQLServer 2005
· Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
· Microsoft Right Management
· Microsoft RoundTable™
· Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile
· Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access
· Avanade Desktop Transformation Solution
· Avanade Enterprise Communication Solution
· Avanade Enterprise Collaboration Solution
· Avanade Migration for Lotus Notes Solution
· Avanade ACA Dynamic Systems Framework
· Avanade ACA Messaging Migration Engine
· Avanade Application Lifecycle Manager
· Avanade ACA.NET


What’s Next:
In a constantly changing workplace, communication is more than a technology—it needs to be part of a strategic long-term vision for your business and technology platform. Does your current platform offer the flexibility to provide users what they need today and will want tomorrow? Does it offer a strong foundation to build on? Avanade can assist your organization to review and assess your current platform with a business productivity assessment, discuss and draft a business productivity long-term strategy with a tactical roadmap, document a business case to quantify benefits versus cost, and then work with your organization to implement an improve rationalized digital collaboration platform.

For information on how Avanade can enable Microsoft technologies for the Next Generation Workplace, or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade's Next Generation Data Center - Data Center Optimization

In this tight economic climate, customers look to fund projects that offer a fast return on investment and provide opportunities to lower costs. In a 2008 survey, CIO Insight ranked IT cost cutting as a major priority for CIOs.[1] According to Gartner, Inc., server consolidation and virtualization projects provide an attractive option to reduce costs and improve flexibility and they predict that virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010.

Initiatives to create “green” data centers are gaining importance as companies seek to reduce costs while cutting energy demand and carbon emissions.[2] With strong price-for-performance advantages, Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ and Microsoft® System Center technologies helped Microsoft attain a 23 percent share of the virtualization market in 2008.
[3]

Key competitive virtualization vendors include VMware, HP, and IBM. Competitive offerings lack the full range of capabilities found in the Avanade solution or depend on hardware that adds cost and complexity. Independent analysis confirms that, on the whole, Microsoft virtualization can cost as little as one-third the price of VMware.[4] Drawing upon our unique and long-standing partnership with Microsoft, Avanade provides holistic solutions that help customers take advantage of compatibility throughout their Microsoft infrastructure. Our solutions provide a breadth of virtualization and management capability at the most cost-effective price for the enterprise.

Avanade is in a uniquely advantageous competitive position as a leading global IT consultancy dedicated to the Microsoft platform. Our innovative tools, methodologies, and accelerators extend the capabilities of Microsoft data center solutions and speed time to deployment and implementation.

With the Avanade Virtualization Business Case Estimator™, Avanade consultants can accurately estimate deployment time and resource requirements for server virtualization projects, and project customer cost savings. Our Avanade Connected Architecture® Dynamic Systems Framework provides a platform for Avanade consultants to design, build, and deploy next generation data centers in a highly repeatable and predictable fashion, accelerating time to delivery and enhancing implementation quality.

In addition to privileged insights into Microsoft road maps and new technology, Avanade has a depth of internal resources with more than 9,000 professionals in 22 countries worldwide, including development centers in India and the Philippines. Using the right mix of local and remote resources, Avanade helps customers realize results with our next generation data center solution.

For information on how Avanade can enable Microsoft technologies for data centers or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

For a white paper on Virtualization entitled "Server Virtualization: A Step Toward Cost Efficiency and Business Agility", please click on http://avanadecalgary.com/Avanade_Calgary/Whitepapers.html and fill out the form.

[1] Source: CIO Insights, http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Research/CIOs-Rank-Their-Top-Priorities-for-2008/.
[2] Source: Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=530109.
[3] Source: IDC, http://www.virtualization.info/2008/10/microsoft-already-took-23-of.html.
[4] Clabby Analytics: Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V Will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace, May 2008, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/05-2008ClabbySixReasonsWhyMSwillovertakeVMW.PDF.

Canadian firms lead in adopting cloud computing

This is an interesting article that references Avanade and Cloud Computing.

Canadian firms lead in adopting cloud computing
Nestor E. Arellano
IT World Canada
February 24, 2009

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/News/fd83008e-b4c6-4393-a4d5-7eaae30654e9.html

More than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide, according to a survey commissioned by Avanade.

Canadian IT decision makers are more informed about cloud computing than their global counterparts and local organizations lead the world in adopting the technology, according to a recent survey of large enterprise firms.

While a majority of the respondents believed that cloud computing holds the potential to improve productivity and profits during the economic recession, security issues remain a major hurdle to adoption, and almost 84 per cent of those polled indicated they had no plans of switching from their current internal IT systems.

The survey, conducted by Kelton Research for Avanade, a Seattle-based IT consultancy company specializing in Microsoft enterprise platforms, queried 502 C-level executives and IT and business decision-makers from mostly large enterprise organizations in 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore. The study covered a wide variety of industries such as government, aerospace, defense, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, finance, media, manufacturing and non-profit organizations.

More than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide, the survey found.

"Canada appears lead cloud computing adoption mainly because local IT leadership is more proactive in exploring the technology," notes Kaytek Przybylski, capability director for Avanade Canada.

He said the survey indicates that 71 per cent of respondents in Canada were familiar with cloud computing compared to only 61 per cent of their global counterparts.

Cloud computing refers to the use of Internet-based computer technology to access and deliver a variety of services to users. Cloud computing uses data centres and servers built on virtualization technologies to deliver applications and resources to users, typically under what is called a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Under this model, customers generally do not own the infrastructure; they merely access or pay rent for its use and thereby avoid capital expenditure.

Nearly two in three IT executives worldwide (65 per cent) and four of five in Canada (80 per cent) believe cloud computing reduces upfront costs.

Cloud computing adoption in Canada, however is still at its early stages, according to the Avanade executive. "The technology is considered to be relatively new and even here many companies are still considering cloud computing."

Other key findings of the survey were:

• Executives, by a five-to-one ratio, report they trust existing internal systems over cloud-based systems due to fear of security threats and loss of control over data and systems.

• More than 50 per cent of respondents use technologies to cut costs.

• Four out of five respondents admit their existing internal systems are too expensive.

• 71 per cent of C-level executives and IT decision-makers agree that cloud computing is a "real" technology option.

• While nearly half of the respondents consider themselves to be early adopters of technology, 61 per cent worldwide are not using cloud computing.

• More than 80 per cent of those using internally owned IT systems do not plan on integrating any form of cloud computing in the next 12 months.

• Respondents recognizes that cloud computing allows companies to focus on core business (65 per cent), react more quickly to market conditions (62 per cent), gain access to the latest technology (51 per cent) and improve flexibility (70 per cent).

Security issues are typical concerns when it comes to adopting new technology, according to Craig Balding, a security practitioner with a Fortune 500 company, blogger and co-author of Maximum Security: A Hacker's Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site and Network.

But Balding said by combining cloud computing with thin clients that hold only small amounts of data in cache there is actually less physical exposure to data leakage.

The survey findings bolster earlier views aired by technology industry experts during ITWorld Canada's recently concluded Cloud Computing Conference.

Lack of clarity about the technology among technology professionals is one of the key obstacles to adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise, according Reuven Cohen, founder of Enomoly, an IT consulting firm based in Toronto.

He said many organizations are torn between IT departments who want to maintain control of IT resources and business units who prefer more flexibility to rapidly deploy applications.
The technology sector has been heading toward cloud-based computing for a long time, but companies also must be cautious when buying into a trend, according to Jackie Fen, vice-president for research firm Garnet Inc.

"You really need to know why you're adopting these technologies. You just can't leap in every time a new thing gets hyped, " she said.

Przybylski said the survey indicates that cloud computing technology vendors must tackle the international concerns about security and control of data in order to boost adoption of the technology.

He noted that nearly one-third of the companies using cloud-based systems have increased their use of cloud computing, even during the economic downturn, after seeing its benefits.

For information on how Avanade can enable Microsoft technologies for Cloud Computing or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at http://www.avanadecalgary.com/.

Creating a Definitive Software Library and Saving $330+/desktop

Does your company have a definitive software library? Do you know how much you are spending on software? Do you know how much you are potentially overspending on software?

Avanade Inc. has created IP or Avanade Connected Architecture (ACA) to assist companies with creating definitive software library called ACA Accelerate.

ACA Accelerate helps Avanade rapidly discover and rationalize an end-user computing landscape.

- ACA Accelerate can reduce per-seat TCO by up to 33%.
- ACA Accelerate is fast and is a prescriptive approach. Value is seen in a matter of days.
- ACA Accelerate gives you a consistent approach to collecting hardware and software inventory.
- After collection they can manually analyze the data in spreadsheets to compare Current State with Future State and drive cost savings.

Based on market information, the typical desktop costs an organization $5000/year to maintain. On average, 20% of that cost is software. By running ACA Accelerate, a company can potentially reduce their software costs by up to 33% or by $330.

On a firm that has 1000 desktops, this is a savings of $330,000 per year for redundant, unused and multiple software version of the same software. Running ACA Accelerate has a ROI that allows for a payback with in days or weeks.

WHen this service is utilized with a desktop transformation process, for example moving from Windows XP to Vista, an organization can typically cover a portion or potentially all of the costs of the migration. In addition, if a compnay were to look at Application Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization, these savings could be further enhanced.

ACA Accelerate can be demonstrated to your company.

For information on ACA Accelerate or other services that Avanade Inc. can provide your organization in Western Canada, please contact Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at www.avanadecalgary.com.

Intoduction to Avanade Inc. in Calgary

Avanade Canada, Inc., a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, is a global IT consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft® platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth. Through proven solutions that extend Microsoft technologies, Avanade helps enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage. Our consultants deliver value according to each customer’s requirements, timeline and budget by combining insight, innovation and the talent of our global workforce. Avanade’s unique connections with Accenture and Microsoft enhance our ability to deliver effective mission-critical solutions for organizations worldwide.

Our local consultants can assist your organization on any Microsoft related products, such as SharePoint, Dynamics, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server and many others.

To determine how Avanade can assist your organization, please call Chris Hamilton at 403-476-1473 or contact via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Avanade Inc.’s Calgary website can be viewed at www.avanadecalgary.com.