Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies

Product Description

A businessperson's guide to network technologies

• Written for any business professional. Understand the purpose and business value of network technologies in order to know which ones to adopt.
• Assess the benefits. Provides criteria that help you ask the right questions of vendors and other advisors to make technology choices and prepare budget justifications.
• Apply advice for your business. See which network technologies are best suited to your priorities and processes and the tradeoffs between various alternatives.
• Covers the technologies you need to know. Topics include wireless networks, IP telephony, managed services, network security, and other enabling technologies.
• Become more competitive. Learn from benchmark examples of how technologies are adopted and employed by others to create differentiation for your organization.

Small-medium businesses (SMBs) cannot grow without finding more effective ways to streamline their processes, develop differentiated products and services, deliver them to the right customers, and work collaboratively with partners. Growth-directed SMBs must set themselves apart for success by adopting innovative yet proven tools to improve efficiencies, stimulate productivity, be more responsive to customers, and boost the bottom line. Network technologies can help do that and more.

The challenge is knowing where to begin.

Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide To Enabling Network Technologies addresses the need for clear, business-aware technical information. It explores the relevance and business value of network technologies and how to gauge what's right for your organization. The book also provides a high-level primer on network technologies in plain English. It defines the technologies and how they work in accessible language.

Beyond that, Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies provides advice on proven network technologies as business enablers, arming you with the right questions to ask of yourself and your vendors when planning new or enhanced networks. With this book as an educational resource on networking, you will be better prepared to invest in network technologies and shape your own success.

This volume is in the Network Business Series offered by Cisco Press. Books in this series provide IT executives, decision makers, and networking professionals with pertinent information on today's most important technologies and business strategies.

158705135403152004

Interview(s)

Let's Talk Computers®

Computer Outlook Radio Talk Show, TechTidbits/Authors, September 23, 2004

Small Business IT World

Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful Powerful Business Guide for Network Success, June 21, 2004 By  G. A. Marken (Santa Clara, CA United States) - See all my reviews    This review is from: Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies (Paperback) Finally someone has written a book on computer networking for the man/woman who signs the check rather than the network technician. While there are hundreds of books for executives about management style, organization, profit/loss, people selection and marketing. This is the first easy-to-read, easy-to-understand book we've read that tells you how to use technology to streamline your business processes and use the dizzying array of previously mysterious technologies to monitor and control business processes, product/service development and reaching the right customers profitably. Ms Aber has balanced her technical background at 3Com and Cisco with her practical SMB experience gained involved in a struggling start-up - OneWorld Systems - and modestly successful mid-sized firm - Novartis. Power-Up Your Small-Medium Business is divided into four logical sections - the value of networking, network basics, advanced technologies and implementation considerations. The network... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful Useful Reference for Business People to Understand/Justify Technology, March 1, 2012 By  Dusty Jacquet (California) - See all my reviews This review is from: Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies (Paperback) Robyn Aber states in the preface to this book that it is targeted primarily to business-people who want to understand and be able to justify in business terms (productivity, etc.) various network technologies. The author also says in the Preface that the definition for small - medium businesses being used is not 'Mom and Pops," but rather 'small' businesses starting from around 70 employees and going up from there. The book covers classic, still-fundamental technologies (like Ethernet) as well as technologies that were emerging at the time of publication (VoIP, wireless, network storage, etc.). Many of which are just taking root now. Not surprising, as most new networking technologies typically have very slow roll-out and adoption paths. What the book is especially valuable for are the descriptions of each of the technologies. Even complex technologies are described in terms that business-people can understand for themselves (in a non-condescending way) and that... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment 0 of 2 people found the following review helpful Outdated now, February 24, 2012 By  rpv (CA) - See all my reviews This review is from: Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies (Paperback) Long ago, analog phones and private branch exchanges (PBXs) were all a small business had with respect to networking equipment. With so many networking technologies becoming available in recent years, it is definitely a good idea to have a book about them. Seeing the title of the book, I began to think about the possible contents. The networking technologies that came to mind before reading the book, which I thought should be included in a book of this nature, were phones (both analog and voice over IP (VoIP)), high-speed Internet connections, virtual private networks (VPNs), 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, personal digital assistant (PDA) cellular phones, network security appliances, biometric protections, and so on. In fact, the book covers many of these topics. Currently with advent of social medium and app industry emergence, some of the areas are outdated and could be improved. The book is very elaborate in terms of technologies... Read more Help other customers find the most helpful reviews  Was this review helpful to you?  Report abuse | Permalink  Comment

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Praise For Power Up Your Small-Medium Business: A Guide to Enabling Network Technologies

Power Up Your Small-Medium Business

Reviewer Name: Andy Marken, Marken Communications
Rating: **** out of *****

Finally someone has written a book on computer networking for the man/woman who signs the check rather than the network technician.

While there are hundreds of books for executives about management style, organization, profit/loss, people selection, and marketing, this is the first easy-to-read, easy-to-understand book we've read that tells you how to use technology to streamline your business processes and use the dizzying array of previously mysterious technologies to monitor and control business processes, product/service development and reaching the right customers profitably.

Ms. Aber has balanced her technical background at 3Com and Cisco with her practical SMB experience gained involved in a struggling start-up, OneWorld Systems, and modestly successful mid-sized firm, Novartis.

Power-Up Your Small-Medium Business is divided into four logical sections: the value of networking, network basics, advanced technologies and implementation considerations. The network basics section is probably very intriguing to people who tinker and tweak technology, for most business owners and managers we thought it was a lot like reading a book on how your car engine works—interesting but more than we wanted to know.

Because most SMB owners/mangers are more focused on results rather than the how-to, the first section, The Value of Networking, is a good primer on the strategic aspects of the technologies. Forget about having to take a computer science course on how network technologies do whatever they do. Whether you sit at the desk where the buck stops or have to make recommendations that will help your area of responsibility—engineering, manufacturing, logistics, marketing or sales—Ms. Aber explores why business people need to use the technology in dollar and cents as well as real business terms.

Since we know enough about the technologies to be dangerous, we skipped to the fourth implementation section because this is where most sales and technical people seem to throw up all the smoke and mirrors as to what they are going to do for you. Again using words that real people can understand she lays out a variety of application scenarios that small-medium business managers can consider.

Her approach is to give you a set of basic to full-blown technology recommendations you can use depending upon your budget. More importantly, unlike most technologists who fall in love with and design/implement a closed-loop solution for you she outlines some technology growth plans you can use.

As a result you don't have to commit to solution A, B, C, D or E, but can buy off on solution A/B and have a plan on how you can get to E as your company grows. In addition—and equally important—she gives the reader an insight into the technologies you may want to consider that firms may possibly use to give them a competitive edge in their markets: wireless everywhere, video-enablement and electronic business-to-business or business-to-consumer. Just by reading these two sections a business manager or unit manager has the tools he or she needs to hire someone—internally or externally—to carry out the company's network-powered program.

The reader is well-armed with information to know what questions to ask, what to expect, and how to use the technologies once the company has them in place.

The middle sections are really reference chapters. Want to know networking basics? Ms. Aber lays out the areas—computer networks, switching/routing, security, intranet/extranet and virtual networks—so you can understand the concepts. Again she delivers enough information you can actually understand so you know when people are making recommendations that will benefit your company or their profit.

The advanced technology or "gee whiz" section is fun to read. She actually makes it easy for you to understand what is here now and on the horizon that can be used to give you an edge over the guy down the street, across the country or halfway around the globe. It is pretty obvious that Ms. Aber thoroughly understands her technologies because she explains them so well that whether you have an accounting, marketing or MBA degree you can do a little dreaming and imagine how the technologies can be used in your organization or by others in your marketplace.

Ms. Aber's writing makes dry and dull disarmingly easy to understand.

Whether you head a small-medium size company or are a business unit manager, Power Up Your Small-Medium Business is a good primer and working tool to understand what is out there and available to you, as well as what it can do for your company's bottom line.

If you are in one of the 10 million 100-1,000 employee firms that have an IT department, the book will help you understand what your people are recommending to you, and whether you believe the recommendations will help you reach your goals.

If you are like us and in the majority of American business (20-100 employees), where a network manager has to wear two or three hats, the book becomes even more valuable. Most of us outsource the network technology implementation and have a service person on call...just in case. Ms. Aber gives the business owner the power to understand what the technologies are, what they are going to be and how we can use them to our advantage.

Finally the biggest segment of American business has a roadmap they can read and understand about the mysterious field of network technologies that focus on discussing them in business terms, not techie terms.

Index

Download - 198 KB -- Index

Table of Contents

Introduction.

I. THE VALUE OF NETWORKING.

II. Network Basics.

III. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES.

IV. IMPLEMENTATION CONSIDERATIONS.

Downloadable Sample Chapter

Sample Chapter - 2.4 MB -- Chapter 1: Performing with a Net: Becoming a Network-Centric Business