Small and medium-sized businesses found 2008 to be the year when many previously “leading edge” and “out of reach” technologies became accessible and, more importantly, critical to their bottom line.  In 2008, SMB technology teams, ISVs, and IT consultants were transforming their technology deployments to hosting services utilizing formerly out-of-reach technologies.

For the first time, SMBs were benefiting from solutions and technologies such as Software as a Service, Quad-Core CPUs, Virtualization, and the new Microsoft server technologies.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the preferred method for SMBs to consume software to meet their application and business process needs.  SMBs now clearly see that it no longer makes sense to buy software and hardware from traditional retailers and distributors.  The VARs and MSPs that service SMBs have moved from break-fix agreements to recurring arrangements with their SMB customers.  In 2008, SaaS became not only a viable option but in many ways the preferred solution.  Large capital outlays on new hardware and the associated big expenses on installation and upgrade licenses are now seen as the not financially advisable and inefficient.  Hosted dedicated servers and virtual dedicated servers enable SMBs and their VARs to quickly deploy new solutions and upgrades and save time and capital.

Intel’s Xeon Quad-Core processors became the mainstream CPUs that small and medium sized businesses and their VARs chose to deploy their new applications and services on.  With more and more support for multi-core CPUs by operating systems and applications, and the decreasing costs for these processors, they became the default configuration.  In 2008, with dedicated servers running Quad-Core CPUs, SMBs are were harnessing an incredible amount of computing power.

2008 also saw virtualization technology transition from being either a low-end solution or big corporate technology.  On the low end, non-hypervisor based VPS hosting solutions were being outgrown by early adopters while on the high-end VMware’s ESX became an affordable and viable solution that SMBs could implement quickly and with a tremendous amount of flexibility.

Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008 technologies were released and are quickly becoming relevant to SMBs and the architects responsible for selecting platforms.  With IIS 7, Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft Expression tools being in their second generation, Microsoft has a compelling end-to-end platform that offers the best of open source and Microsoft’s traditional strengths.  Dedicated servers with Windows Server 2008 Web, Data Center, Standard or Enterprise versions are affordable and ready for tomorrow.

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Tags: ISV, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Quad-Core, SaaS, VAR, VMware