In a statement released on Monday 1st May, Scott Dodds, Microsoft UK General Manager said :

“Because of sustained currency differences between European countries, Microsoft is taking action to establish and maintain price consistency in the region for our volume licensing programmes, from July 1 in the UK, these adjustments will result in £ sterling price list rises for new volume licensing contracts of between 7.5 percent and 33.5 percent, to ensure greater consistency with the equivalent Euro price list.”

The net effect for Hosted Desktop providers will be a 33.4% increase in license costs from their primary supplier at a time when margins are already squeezed. Although it is too early to assess the final effect on customers, a double-digit percentage price rise looks almost inevitable for all new adopters after July 1st. Existing customers will see their pricing protected until the end of December as part of a concession hammered out with Microsoft.

Justifying the price increase as a “standardisation” across Europe rather ignores the fact that the equivalent pricing for US customers, even at current FEX rates, is 10% less than the UK. Once applied, the price increases will mean that all of the EU will have licensing 45% more expensive than North America.

It’s hard not to feel mugged.

Rather like asking a Turkey to vote in favour of Christmas lunch….

For the more “forward-thinking” IT leader, cloud computing offers an opportunity of course. An opportunity to focus on bringing value to the business by reducing the costs of IT delivery and allowing the business to grow revenues knowing that IT can scale quickly to match their requirements.

Want to know more? Try out a hosted desktop environment and see how easy it is to migrate to a cloud based solution and keep all your applications.

In a commissioned by EMC, the CEBR (Centre for Economics and Business Research) estimates that cloud computing could be worth €763bn to the top five European economies over the next five years and will see the creation of 2.4 million jobs.

Can this possibly be true? David Bradshaw, a cloud computing specialist at the analyst firm IDC, thinks it can.

“This is a big shift in the way things are done in the IT domain. It might be slow at the start but in ten years’ time, we’ll look back and see that it has transformed everything. It is at least as big a shift as the switch to client/server computing,” he says.

Whether you agree with the estimates or not, it seems inevitable that more and more companies will look to place their consumption of IT services with cloud providers in order to gain the benefits of cost stability, scalability and predictability.

Not just for the big boys

Small and medium sized companies stand to benefit most from the transformation because significant IT spend usually represents a higher percentage of their capital budget than it would at an enterprise business. A cloud service levels the playing field in terms of the sophistication of technology that a SME can afford.

In addition, a SME will often benefit from improved flexibility – home and remote working, temporary and agency staff, mobile access are all bundled with a cloud offering and require no complex systems at the SME.

If you’re an SME thinking of upgrading that server in the corner of the office, then think long and hard about the alternatives. Hosted virtual desktops could give you everything you need with no capital expenditure and unlimited scalability. Worth a look, surely?

Obviously there are issues of control and management when your staff are geographically spread, not to mention the challenge of maintaining communication – but surely with the sort of technologies that now exist, things like Hosted Desktops and VoIP, it should be possible for them to productive almost anywhere.

Its not like the benefits are not immediately financially tangible. In fact, an employee who works three days a week from home can save £3,775 a year on commuting costs and spare the environment 4000 kilograms of pollutants, according to Telework Exchange, an organisation promoting the practice.

With the migration of technology away from on-premise to the cloud, could it be time to create a meaningful remote/teleworking policy for your employees? If so then we can help.

“In the old days, big companies used to generate their own electricity. But they do not do that any more”, says Philip Carnelley, senior analyst at TechMarketView. “Software is going the same way – let others do the processing.”

Although  there remain a large number of analysts and researchers who believe that cloud computing won’t transform the way that Companies buy and consume their IT, the migration away from on-premise solutions is gathering pace.  The number of companies offering the equivalent of a “desktop in a box” via hosted desktops is increasing almost daily and the number of companies looking for cloud solutions (rather than having to be persuaded) is also up.

You can read the full article on the BBC website here but if you just want more information about cloud computing or hosted desktops then you can contact us.

Now, there’s an element of smoke and mirrors here because of course you have to subscribe to web services to be able to do anything productive and building your own patchwork quilt of IT services to run a business on, may not sound that attractive. However, as the author of a useful article on the subject notes, there are aggregators out there who can provide a complete desktop to such a bare-bones client and it will look, feel and operate just like your local software – but on a subscription model so you only pay for what you use.

You can read the full article in information week here http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229500069

We’re especially grateful here for the recognition that hosted, or online desktops are the future of IT…after all, that’s pretty much all we’ve been doing for the past 5 years or so.

According to the most recent research on the subject, the average commute to work is 8.5 miles or 17 miles a day. So…if you’re working the normal 240 or so days a year you will spend around £2,500 getting there and back. You will also waste 360 hours of  your life – roughly a month and a half that you could have spent being productive.

Is it any wonder that more and more business are looking at IT solutions that allow more of their employees to work smarter? Take a hosted desktop solution from a cloud computing provider and your staff can work from any internet enabled location, including their “home office”. Couple it with robust VoIP telephones and your company can be extended seamlessly to anywhere and still feel as professional to your customers as it always did.

Distributed people and technology makes you more resilient (if the office burns down you are still in business) and whilst you have to work harder to collaborate properly, most people communicate by email even when they’re sat next to the person they are corresponding with (that’s not an endorsement – just an observation!).

If you run your own business and its getting close to the time when you refresh your technology then you should give cloud computing a serious look. Predictable IT costs, high availability and improved productivity are a hosted desktop away….

That set us to wondering how disruptive that could be for people who have to commute via train to work every day, not least those of you tied to the City of London where the RMT seem particularly militant. On the back of the travel chaos caused by bad weather in December (of which, surely we can expect more) we could be looking at a genuine period of discontent lasting until at least the Royal wedding in April. Hardly attractive.

If you are the owner/manager of an SME looking to ensure productivity during the disruption to come then maybe now is a good time to consider hosted virtual desktops as an alternative to on-premise IT. You get highly available IT services, accessible from any internet connected location, with all your applications and data included. Your office becomes completely mobile.

Want to try a demo to see for yourself? http://www.entrustit.co.uk/contact-us.asp

However, the one universal rule we always apply when buying services is that we always dismiss the cheapest option; because in the case of an ongoing service we want to be sure that our “partner” is going to be around for a while and appropriate pricing is key to that.

Now, we are in the business of supplying hosted (or virtual) desktops to SME customers and clearly, although that appears to be a “product”; in reality its a service. Yes, we deliver a tangible thing but IT is something that lives and dies by the quality of support you get and how available it is and good quality support coupled to a highly available service like ours has a cost.

What most people don’t realise is that companies like ours share a similar cost base; we all pay the same amount to Microsoft for every user; we all have similar staff costs (regional variations excepted) and we all have pretty much identical equipment and data centre costs if we are doing the job properly. Let’s assume that the quality companies with quality products in this space will probably have mean pricing variants of about 5% – more than that and something is probably missing, most likely in the quality of the infrastructure where you really don’t want skimping.

In fact (and to quote John Ruskin) : “It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better”

The fact is, that once you’ve handed over your IT services to a third party  you have taken a bet on their longevity. Obviously you don’t want to pay way over the odds for any generic service but at the same time, if the selling price is way below the rest of the market then it’s going to be a lot harder for them to keep trading indefinitely. Not a big problem if you’re buying a car or a washing machine, somewhat different if your business is utterly dependent on them being there.

With something you walk away with it matters less; you still have the product and support can probably be obtained elsewhere…but with a service you simply can’t. That cheap hosted desktop quotation could end up being very expensive in the long-run and if your data was unavailable because the company had gone bust, would your business survive?

I wonder how many consecutive years we will be hit by snow before someone decides that this is normal UK weather for the time of year…

There have been lots of reports on “lost productivity” as a result of the weather but I wonder how genuine this really is? In reality, something you don’t do today or tomorrow will still be there to be done when you finally can make it into work after a thaw. Is it all designed to create subliminal pressure on us to continue to struggle into work when frankly, the sensible solution would be to stay at home and off the roads for a day or two and take the pressure off the emergency and breakdown services.

Yes of course, business must go on but is it really necessary for an increasingly mobile workforce to spend hours trying to struggle to get into their office just so that “the boss” can see them working? Surely it would be far better to have them stay at home, yet remain productive and still able to collaborate with colleagues.

This is of course, one of the primary advantages of Cloud computing, especially when encapsulated in two key technologies hosted desktops and VoIP telephony.

A hosted desktop is a fully featured Windows desktop with all your business applications included, accessed over broadband, it allows you to work anywhere that there is an internet connection – just as if you had the office servers with you. Performance is good enough that you’ll never know that you aren’t working with local applications and data and of course you can collaborate with all your co-workers because you all share the same services.

Couple this to a cloud-based telephone service (called VoIP) you can make and receive calls wherever you are, conference with colleagues and work with your hosted desktop data and no-one would ever know that you were not in the office as normal. Business as usual, despite the weather.

Over the past week or ten days our support calls have mostly been from people who are working from home and need help connecting up. For many this is the first time that they’ve attempted it and they are surprised at how well it all works.

So cloud companies are providing two valuable public services; (1) keeping people off the roads and out of danger and (2) keeping UK Plc open for business.  Small round of applause please.