InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
February 8, 1999
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Emerging enterprises are counting on the Win2000 upgrade to fuel growth
By Stuart J. Johnston with Natalie Engler
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merging enterprises will adopt Windows 2000 significantly more quickly than other businesses, according to a new InformationWeek Research survey. Their goals: increased system performance and simpler administration. These companies--defined as businesses with revenue between $6 million and $500 million that are growing significantly faster than comparable companies in the same industries--are using aggressive IT investment to fuel that growth.Emerging enterprises are seeking the same attributes that most other businesses evaluating Windows 2000 are: increased reliability, faster performance, much easier management, and better scalability. But as they struggle to grow into full-fledged enterprises, these companies must be adroit to survive their surging demand for more powerful, more functional, yet lower-cost IT systems.
"We're going to be going to Windows 2000 sooner than we planned because we have a number of strategic initiatives that demand it," says Scott Dastrup, CIO at SkyMall Inc. in Phoenix. The company, which was founded in 1990 and now has 70% of the in-flight catalog market on domestic airlines, is seeing a sudden boom in its two-year-old electronic-commerce business. While catalog sales were slow for most companies last year, SkyMall's E-commerce revenue took off. In fiscal 1998, the company had E-commerce sales of about $2.1 million compared with $300,000 for fiscal 1997, a 600% increase. SkyMall isn't afraid to invest in technology to support that momentum: Windows 2000 will provide a huge benefit to SkyMall's IT staff, Dastrup says.The company had originally planned to wait to adopt Windows 2000 until at least the first quarter of next year, but strategic demands have Dastrup saying he'll implement the new operating system sooner. If Windows 2000 comes out in the third quarter of 1999, Dastrup says he may move to it immediately. "We're looking at some scalability demands due to the growth in E-commerce needs that we haven't had in the past," he says. Windows 2000 improves Microsoft's scalability by enabling stronger clustering--particularly for Web servers--and also expands support for multiple processors in a single server. (See story, "Windows 2000: Three-Part Harmony".)
Dastrup isn't alone. An InformationWeek Research survey conducted in December found that 75% of emerging enterprises plan to deploy Windows 2000 on the desktop within a year after it ships, compared with 63% for businesses overall and 59% for other small and midsize businesses. Likewise, 68% of emerging enterprises say they'll adopt server versions of Windows 2000 within a year after it ships. That, too, is more aggressive than businesses overall, only 55% of which say they'll adopt server versions that quickly.
Several emerging enterprises say they're looking forward to Active Directory, which promises to track all files, programs, users, and hardware anywhere on a network. Active Directory also incorporates Kerberos security and merges several domains into one--greatly easing administration of both security and the network itself.
"If the directory service does what they say it will--and it does appear to--then we'll go with it quickly, because I want to have only one operating system throughout the company," says Howard Jones, CIO at Snapper Inc., a manufacturer of high-end power mowers and lawn tractors in McDonough, Ga., that's evaluating beta versions of Windows 2000.
Jones is looking for ways to lower administration and maintenance costs. Having the ability to manage the entire network as one domain from a single administrator's console will lessen the workload of Snapper's IT staff, he says. That's because Snapper recently shifted to a more direct sales model, cutting out the middlemen between Snapper and its dealers. "You probably cut out 5% of the price to the dealer," says Jones.But it also means communicating directly with as many as 5,000 individual dealers, as opposed to about 30 distributors. "It was a big culture change, and the salespeople were originally doing [that communicating] by phone and fax," says Jones, noting that the system was a paper nightmare. Then the IT department came into play. Last summer, Snapper put in a sales-force automation system built on Windows NT and the Microsoft Exchange Server messaging engine, which provides a direct Internet link between dealers and the company. The system lets dealers and Snapper's 70 call-service reps and outside salespeople place orders using the Microsoft Outlook personal mail client by connecting to the Exchange Server E-mail engine, which runs on NT Server 4.0.
The shift worked. Largely because of the new sales model, privately held Snapper grew by about 20% last year. Because that growth is continuing, Jones wants to reduce the IT workload by making the system easier to manage and maintain--and Windows 2000's Active Directory holds that promise. While Jones would like to be able to wait six months after Windows 2000 ships--or at least until he's sure the system is stable--he says the promised benefits are too compelling to wait.
"We'll more than likely go with it when it comes out," he says. Snapper has already run its applications on the beta versions of Windows 2000 and, "with minor tweaks," it tested fine.
Ash Shehata, IS director for Antelope Valley Healthcare Systems, a health provider in Lancaster, Calif., is looking forward to Active Directory to ease the company's crushing network-management load. An- telope Valley Healthcare went from one WAN site to 12 in a year, Shehata says. With Active Directory, the company's administrators won't have to duplicate management tasks in 12 separate domains, as they must today.
continued...page 2, 3
Read sidebar story, "Windows 2000: Three-Part Harmony."
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