IT departments shouldn't dismiss startups when looking for vendors, says network security veteran Matt Stevenson, because newer companies can often provide a faster innovation cycle and quicker customer service at a more affordable price than more-established vendors.
Forget disaster recovery, virtualization, and Web 2.0. The phrase of the season in IT departments around the world seems to be "hunker down." That's the advice from venture capitalists, bankers, and financial counselors to companies of all sizes, who tell everyone to only buy what you have to, watch your head count, work smarter, and cut where you can.
Hunkering down, however, can't mean sacrificing opportunities and sales, and in fact, IT now more than ever needs to prove how it's supporting the business and enabling the sales force and other groups to succeed, maximizing productivity and increasing revenue.
How do IT leaders prioritize investments and balance this enablement with fiscal belt tightening?
One way is to look at which vendors in the market are providing the most innovative, cost-effective solutions that meet your needs. While IT always wants to minimize management overhead and back-end infrastructure, today's economic situation demands you find solutions that are more deeply integrated, leverage existing investments, and require fewer back-end servers.
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I've found that the greatest innovation often comes from startup companies and not the established vendors, who perhaps you've relied on previously. This is because startups typically achieve a much faster innovation cycle and are able to respond to customer needs more quickly and effectively. Smaller companies are willing to launch breakthrough, disruptive technologies that usually solve IT challenges in a new and more affordable or effective way.
Take the network security market as a prime example. Over the past few years, nearly all the greatest innovations, from a plug-and-play firewall appliance to early SSL VPN solutions to zero day protection and spam filtering, all came from spunky startups, like WatchGuard, Neoteris, Cloudmark, and Whole Security, to name only a few.
Most of those early companies are now part of much larger organizations. In fact, if you look at the list of acquisitions by Cisco, Microsoft, Symantec, or IBM, it's clear that many big tech firms simply outsource their R&D innovations to startups, because they can't move the ship fast enough to respond to the latest market trends and needs.
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