In a world where cloud is decreasing the service bouquet of small individual PC or IT operators it is becoming increasingly important for the local IT guy on the corner to adapt to new offerings to survive in the future.
If you are a small one or two man IT company looking for clients or trying to find new business for your IT consultancy you would know that during the past few years it has become increasingly harder to survive. Your billing is decreasing, margins are under pressure and the amount of services that you are able to offer your existing client base has been steadily declining. Once before you were removing virus, spyware and setting up printers, things have changed as your customers have changed to adopt cloud services, mobile smartphones and tablets. In South Africa we have been lagging behind adoption numbers and we have been fortunate enough to be able to benefit from this delayed adoption. But, as always, all good things must come to an end and we are about to start experiencing the effects of cloud service adoption on our own bottom lines.
It is not all doom and gloom though, researchers estimate that companies, governments and individuals would only after the year 2020 obtain over half of their services from the cloud. You need to adapt to survive and in an ever changing tech environment you need to understand the facts, not opinions or possibilities but the established facts first. It is becoming time for the corner IT shop, to go cloud and to compete with the large multinational in terms of offering services to existing clients. This series of articles will explore the offerings of the future and the practical products that the local IT guy can offer, even in the face of Goliath type competition. The series will also focus on the alternate service offerings that may replace the current revenue streams and how to establish a winning range of products that would serve to best allow survival of the future.
