Business Ramblings – Page 3

Virtualization Kills Corporate Owned Laptop

February 17, 2009 Leave a Comment

Today I had yet another of my customers indicate that they are trying to figure out how to get rid of the corporate owned laptop. Last fall I had a similar discussion with a customer about employee owned laptops. At that time it was a conversation with an IT knowledge worker who would have rather been given the choice of which laptop he could use versus be forced upon a single brand. This time it was from an IT executive who would rather reduce his corporate desktop support costs by getting ride of the physical computers all together.

By providing a yearly or bi-yearly stipend and a set of minimum system requirements, let the employee buy the laptop of their choice. The company provides the business desktop as a virtual desktop that runs back in the data center and the employee accesses it from their own computer. Lower or no hardware support costs, data is secure in the corporate data center, easier centralized backups, and longer refresh cycles as the virtual desktop’s computing power can be dynamically expanded when needed and the servers can run for 4-5 years versus the company paying the expense of the refreshing laptop hardware every 2-3 years.

I think this company could get there eventually. Though it won’t be for all laptops in the organization, but a larger enough number of them to make the savings turn into real dollars.

My Cost Saving Advice Being Taken

February 13, 2009 Leave a Comment

I have noticed an interest change in behavior lately, and it’s been mostly from my customers. A number of them have started to place the toll conference line number in their meeting invites (some even first with the title of Preferred). Could it be that they read the post I made back in December advocating just this type of behavior as an easy way to help save corporate money on conference calls?

I’m more than happy to take the credit. How about a small 1% of the savings commission fee? 🙂

Cost Cutting As Close As Your Next Conference Call

December 17, 2008 1 Comment

By now it should be no surprise to anyone that every business is looking to cut costs. In an economic recession like the one we are in, even those business that are still doing well are cutting costs as the future is so unknown. There is one area of cost cutting that is so simple and so close to everyone in a company…and yet most companies don’t really focus on it.

The Conference Call.

With so many remote employees, the conference call line is necessity of modern business. As a career member of sales teams, I have always had my own personal conference line. This conference line consists of both a toll free and a toll dial in number. Most of the time when I get a conference call invite in my inbox, the location is the toll free conference line number. And most of the time this is costing the company more money that it should.

At a previous company, an analysis was done of our telecom usage. It was concluded that we were wasting over $100,000 a year on duplicate phone charges from our conference calls alone (and this was a company of less than 500 people). Every time we would dial the toll free conference call number, we were paying substantially more than if we were to use the toll number. Add on to that the fact that we were usually dialing that toll free number from a company phone, and we were getting double billed: once for the local phone change and once for the toll free conference line.

By raising the awareness of this situation to the entire company and by adapting user’s behaviors — we all started to include both the toll and toll free conference line number in meeting invites and always dialed the toll number when using a company paid for phone line — the company was able to save a substantial portion of this $100,000 per year phone waste.

Extrapolate this estimated wastefulness up (or down) to the size of your company and see how much money you might be wasting yearly. Changing your corporate and personal behavior is an easy way to reduce this waste.

A helpful tip for companies of all sizes during these economic times.

Update: A client of mine brought up an interesting point during a recent discussion on this topic. His company uses IP Phones internally. With the phones leveraging the exising data network, calls within any location for the company world wide are free. But, when someone dials a toll-free conference call number, they are routed outside the network and start to incure a phone charge. This client happens to produce their own conferencing solution, so the costs really start to add up when the toll-free confernce numbers are called since the entire conference system is “free per use” as long as they don’t leave their IP network.