Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

Wondering how Community IT Innovators compares to other Managed Service Providers (MSPs)? We were selected in the top 200 Managed Service Providers in North America. As a company with a social mission plus a commitment to social and environmental sustainability, we have a broad definition of what it means to be successful as a company. However, we are very proud to be recognized as successful in the way that the IT services industry measures success.

“MSPs on this year’s North America 200 list lifted their annual recurring revenues 25 percent to US$1.05 billion, an impressive feat,” said Joe Panettieri, editorial director of Nine Lives Media. “Those MSPs are now managing 4.1 million desktop and mobile devices for customers, up 33 percent from 2010.”

The MSPmentor 200 North America Edition is based on data from MSPmentor’s global online survey, conducted October-December 2011. The MSPmentor 200 North America Edition recognizes top managed service providers based on a range of metrics, including annual managed services revenue growth, revenue per employee, managed services offered and customer devices managed.

According to Amy Katz, president of Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media, “In the fiercely competitive IT services market, these MSPs represent the best of the best.”

Heading into 2011, Community IT Innovators had high hopes and expectations for what Google Apps could mean for non-profit organizations. Google waives the already modest $50/user annual fee for any qualifying non-profit with less than 3000 staff. (As we later learned, qualifying can become a not-so-trivial factor in process of “Going Google”.)

The Google concept is compelling: reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) For those of you unfamiliar with TCO, it is meant to capture the entire cost of an IT system. TCO is comprised of not only the initial costs of deployment (hardware, software, labor), but also the ongoing costs for maintaining a system (which could include replacement parts, support contracts and labor, training, lost productivity, etc.)

When planning for technology, organizations need to look at the Total Cost of Owning the technology. This provides a fuller understanding of how much ROI (Return on Investment) an organization can expect to gain from their IT, because it captures the full range of the investment.

The basic premise of the Google Cloud is that the current approach to Information Technology (IT) is unnecessarily costly, and that by Going Google, organizations can dramatically reduce their TCO. There are other reasons to Go Google, such as added features and functionality. As we will see in future blog posts, the functionality benefits can be marginal, by comparison.

How does Google lower TCO?

The most obvious savings are with the data hosting itself. It can be expensive for a small organization to build a server farm sufficiently complex for hosting email, files and domain information. Furthermore, the data security and disaster recovery are often minimal or even non-existent. Google, on the other hand, has vast server resources that can be easily leveraged for small organizations. Through massive economies of scale, non-profits can store their data in SAS-70 certified data centers at no cost. This represents savings on the order of $10k-$100k for most organizations.

There are also savings at the other end of the technology chain. Significant resources are spent maintaining end-user workstations. The equipment itself is expensive, as is the software. Even for non-profit organizations which can obtain donated software from Microsoft and Symantec through TechSoup Stock, someone has to install it and maintain it over time. For organizations that fully embrace the Google approach, the expensive workstation can be replaced by a low-cost Chromebook. For $20/mo, end-users have access to a browser which, if you’ve gone completely Google, is sufficient for everything you need to do.

Finally, managing and maintaining a Microsoft Windows-based server environment (or any Microsoft product for that matter), can be complicated and require extensive training and time. Google has attempted to simplify this task through an improved user interface and simplified information architecture.

This is the theory, at least. And it is a compelling concept. Move your data into a massively leveraged secure cloud, and reduce your end-point device footprint so that it effectively becomes maintenance free. And, finally, simplify your information systems so that they become simple and easy to manage. With these 3 elements in place, organizations can reduce their TCO in dramatic ways.

How well does Google deliver on this promise?

Stay tuned…

• Google Apps for Nonprofits – Eligibility
• Google Apps for Nonprofits – Process Overview
  

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

(Opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens)

As organizations consider their Technology plans for the next 2-5 years, they may feel a Dickensian ambivalence. There is much to be excited about, but there is also a great deal of confusion and apprehension. There are good choices to be made, but there are also bad choices…and it is not often clear which is which. The world is our oyster, and yet there is no solution that quite meets our needs.

As many tech writers and thinkers have noted, we are in the midst of one of the most disruptive periods for information technology (IT) since the dawn of the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, many believe that the current transformation in IT is even more disruptive, more game-changing and life-altering for organizations.

There are numerous forces behind this disruption (more than can be covered in a single blog post), but two that stand out in my mind are fast, ubiquitous Internet access (whether in the form of 100Mbps Cable Internet, or emerging 4G broadband wireless) and small, powerful Lithium battery technology. The combination of advances in these two technologies in the past decade have established a framework for highly distributed computing.

Huh?

Fast Internet + Small Batteries = Access to Information stored Anywhere, from Anywhere

You can now get to your information, whether it is email, documents, notes, pictures, videos, from almost anywhere at any time…which means you can store it almost anywhere…which means you can store it…EVERYWHERE. Hence… “the Cloud”.

This is essentially the Cloud in a nutshell. And the Cloud is a crowded emerging market. If you have dipped into the world of the Cloud you’ve likely been hit with a barrage of concepts (PaaS, SaaS), vendors (Google, MS, Amazon, Rackspace, SalesForce, Box, DropBox, SugarSync, and so many more), and solutions (Google Apps, Office 365, Azure, etc.) It’s a lot to keep up with, and yet most organizations have a nagging feeling that if they are not on top of it, they are going to quickly fall behind.

In this blog series, we attempt to share some of our experiences at CITI with exploring the “Cloud” as a possible solution to our Information Technology (IT) needs. We spent 2011 testing Google Apps as a possible solution, and now, in 2012, we are going to fire up Office 365 and take it for a spin. As we make our way through using Office 365 this year, we’ll be posting our experiences and sharing thoughts and recommendations…so stay tuned!

Next week, “Going Google”.

• Cloud Computing & the Opportunity for Your Nonprofit
• Developing a Cloud Strategy

I recently had the opportunity to speak at NTEN’s Cloud Summit held on October 26^th at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. This in-person event was a great follow-up to the series of Cloud Webinars that NTEN sponsored over the summer.

After the opening plenary by Ami Dar, the Executive Director of Idealist, I spoke on the topic of “Developing a Cloud Strategy”. This session was Livestreamed by NTEN and is available here.

I think that it is important to develop a little deeper understanding of what the term “Cloud” means, since most every IT solution that’s out there has slapped some blue skies on their landing page and dubbed their product a “cloud solution”. At its core a Cloud Solution is an architecture that provides scalable, Internet-accessible services. I like to use the terms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to divide up the solutions that are out there. The solutions that fall in the IaaS and PaaS categories like Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure are typically not practical solutions for most organizations under 200 seats. Organizations in this category are typically looking at the Software as a Service where popular offerings such as Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce, Box.net and Twitter among others are found.

While discussing semantics about what truly qualifies as a Cloud is quite fun most people just want a solution that works. I think that there are three main points to keep in mind when looking at migrating some, or all of your IT systems to the Cloud.

• The Cloud is just another IT Tool :
  • Backup & Availability planning: Just because your data is in the cloud, does not mean that you don’t have to think about your data backup, retention and availability plan. Each vendor will provide different Service Level Agreements that specify how long they’ll store your data. When you read the contract make sure that the Service Level Agreement matches up with your expectation and business requirements. Basic questions such as “What is our email retention policy”, “what is our plan should our provider be down for a day” or “how do we roll back changes after a corrupt data import” are important to discuss; it is important to understand how the solution you have chosen will function.
  • Data portability: Cloud solutions are often very easy to migrate into, but are often quite difficult to migrate away from. Cloud solutions have the extra layer of abstraction so that you don’t have access to the underlying system. Instead of getting the actual SQL data backup you may be given a CSV export of your data, which can be much more difficult to migrate into a different system. Google has done a good job of identifying and working on this issue with their Data Liberation Project. Even with their resources not every Google App has an easy migration path out.
  • Total Cost of Ownership. Yes Google Apps is “free” for non-profits and the Salesforce Foundation will give you 10 “free” seats as a non-profit, but a solution is only free if your time is worth nothing. I think that both of those solutions provide phenomenal capabilities, but there could be other solutions out there, that for a price, will integrate better with your existing systems, allow your organization to work more effectively or provide better support. The term “Total Cost of Ownership” can be a nebulous and far ranging concept, but it is important to look at all aspects, people and technology, that will be impacted by moving to a new IT solution.
• Cloud is outsourcing: Moving to a cloud solution puts one more layer between the end user and the solution provider. Instead of being able to walk down the hall and reboot a server or make a configuration change, that request needs to be routed to your vendor, who may or may not be able to accommodate your request. Moving your data to the cloud often means reading & agreeing to, or just agreeing to a lengthy terms of service contract.  These terms often provide much greater protection and leverage to the vendor than the customer.
• IT becomes focused on the data not the system: As a technologist I love being able to see and touch the IT systems that I support. As more and more IT systems move from physical, on-premise solutions to hosted, “cloud” solutions my work has moved from setting up and installing servers to managing network connectivity and data integration between platforms. There will always be a need for a technically talented person to be able to troubleshoot and fix the PCs, laptops and tablets, but the frequency of that need will diminish. At the opposite end of the spectrum the skills required to implement, support and maintain a scalable cloud architecture are more sophisticated than those required for maintaining a small network in the closet down the hall.

The cloud is in some ways a circle back to the beginning of modern computing where small terminals were physically connected back to the main shared data processing system. We’ve been able to cut the cord and there are many more systems to connect to, but the model is still the same. Look forward for my blog on the power of local processing in 20 years.

Community IT Innovators’ Sr. Consultant Katherine Mowers, and Sr. Consultant Karen Finn of Results Leadership Group are teaming up to lead a seminar hosted by Maryland Nonprofits: Data to Story: Optimizing Performance Management Systems. If you are seeking to better organize your data to help measure, understand and communicate your organization’s impact in the community, register to join in this seminar set for Thursday, December 1 from 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

In this seminar you will be introduced to the tools and business systems necessary to optimize your organization’s current data, enabling you to tell the story of your organization’s impact in a powerful way. This seminar will give you an understanding of which features may be most helpful to the specific needs of your organization and provide software solution examples available on the market (though it will not include a demo of software options).

This seminar is ideal for executive staff, program staff, and/or individuals responsible for managing a nonprofit’s data systems. The Data to Story: Optimizing Performance Management Systems seminar will be hosted  at the Maryland Nonprofits Baltimore office, 190 West Ostend Street, Suite 201 in Baltimore, MD.

We are sharing out the Simplifying and Maximizing Organizational Impact Data presentation — now publicly viewable — presented at the Not-For-Profit Leadership Summit IX in NY on Monday May 9, 2011. Around 50 nonprofit leaders participated in the workshop, engaging in conversation about:   performance accountability and establishing performance measures,  challenges commonly faced such as gaining consistency in collecting data, and how to select appropriate software to support nonprofit business processes and data collection needs. We also touched on the importance of staff participation in the ownership of data … and how when data is turned into useful information, helps you tell your story in a powerful way with current and potential funders, with staff and volunteers, and with other key stakeholders.

Anyone interested in more information, check out the slides and feel free to contact Karen Finn of Results Leadership Group or myself, Katherine Mowers of Community IT Innovators. … An added note:  the tools described – including Results Based Accountability – can be scaled, down or up, depending on the size of your organization. For small nonprofit organizations — there are affordable software options for you to track your data! … Or you can assess and improve the use of what you have.  We can do creative thinking with you, to find a way to plan and implement what you need within your budget, or get you the information you need to obtain funding for these capacity building initiatives. If you have the will, we will partner with you to find the way!