Quocirca's Straight Talking: Look out for the little guy

Vendors who make software and hardware easy enough to use and manage for smaller companies will inevitably reap big rewards, says Quocirca's Jon Collins.

Information technology buying patterns exist as a spectrum, from the purchase of highly commoditised, 'dumb' technologies at one end, to the highly customised, solution-based approaches at the other.

While both individuals and organisations might buy from anywhere in this spectrum, the 'dumb' end of the market tends to be represented by the smallest companies and consumers, who want their technology to be plug-and-play. Meanwhile, the largest companies and public institutions will tend to be in the majority for the highly customised IT solutions, even if they are made up of commodity components.

Due to price erosion, the financial rewards at the bottom end of the market are becoming less and less interesting to branded vendors, who are therefore looking to move up the stack.

There are a number of indicators that vendor companies are attempting to do this. Manufacturers of network cards, hubs and USB flash drives are all trying to up the ante, with products such as storage servers and home media hubs. Software companies such as Microsoft are playing the packaging card, by bringing out business suites that cover everything from customer management to project support. Similarly, Symantec bought Veritas with a core intention to create bigger, more comprehensive software bundles.

In doing so, however, such companies are often hitting a major stumbling block, namely that as their offerings become more complex, so do the difficulties in installing and managing them. Individuals and small businesses, as well as smaller branches and departments of larger organisations, cannot install and manage technology themselves, not least because they lack the IT support resources to do any more than deploy the most basic of technologies. All the same, they need their IT to do the job, just as much as their bigger brethren.

The obvious answer would be to suggest that additional services are required, and that the customer needs to pay for them, in the form of installation services, user support services and diagnostic services if anything goes wrong. Obvious, maybe, but for many small organisations it would be prohibitive to send a person out with every piece of kit. Instead we should look to software to help automate any services that are required.

Unfortunately, the management software capabilities of such offerings are often woefully inadequate, in particular when it comes to hardware from the likes of Freecom, Linksys and Netgear (to name three, but these are not the only culprits).

Hardware manufacturers have never been very good at getting their heads around software, treating it as something added on to make a device work, rather than having any merit of its own. Such products may be technologically innovative, offering a number of previously unavailable features and functions but they often come with insufficient diagnostic and other management tools and require an unreachable level of technical competence to either install and/or maintain them. 'Unreachable' is deliberate - as such products suggest maximum simplicity, the truth is often anything but.

Take, for example, the growing market for network storage devices - and in particular the recent SC101 Storage Central device from Netgear/Zetera. In principle this offers the perfect solution to the storage needs of the small office/home office (SOHO), by providing mirrored disks which can be attached directly to the network as either a highly reliable storage server or a backup device.

Like the little girl with the little curl, however, there are plenty of examples of this device working very well but when it is bad, it offers minimal tooling to help diagnose what is wrong, or to put it right.

The device can, and sometimes does, go wrong - which begs the question of exactly what the data mirroring is for in the first place - and the diagnostic tools at times give out contradictory information about exactly what the device is up to. By itself it cannot even be returned to an original configuration - for this, disks have to be removed from the device and reformatted in another computer.

The SC101 is by no means unique but serves as an example of the kinds of issues such devices should be avoiding. The principle seems to be to make such devices work for the majority of customers, and deal with the consequences for the remainder. Trouble is, given the plug-and-play attitude of this part of the market, the main consequence is to stick the whole thing in a cupboard and ignore it for a while.

However technically competent the support hotlines may be, many customers simply will not use them. Nor will they necessarily buy from the same manufacturer next time round. As long as things remain this way, nobody benefits, least of all the IT vendors themselves.

Let's look on the bright side. It is possible for vendors to create products that are usable out of the box; it is equally possible for them to bundle appropriate software to make such products both usable and manageable. (In its defence, the SC101 comes with SmartSync Pro synchronisation software, which is nearly worth the price of entry by itself.)

It's time to up the ante, to provide workable, packaged solutions for smaller companies that offer the level of service required without breaking the bank. There's the real gap in the market and any company that can crack it deserves to reap the inevitable rewards.