Company Vision

We think that the role of IT is changing, reflected in much of the turmoil of the industry. True, the economy of recent years has not helped. But consider:

• Core network services are now stable and not difficult to implement.
• It is generally the case that all businesses require core network services.
• The motivation for undergoing OS and application upgrades generally is no longer driven by significant advances in stability or capabilities beneficial to the SMB market.
• An IT team can manage far more seats per team member than was possible even a few years ago.
• Companies have matured, and demand a professional, well managed, available and secure IT infrastructure.

All of these lead to the suggestion that core IT services have become a commodity service, well understood and managed with tools and procedures that allow for cost effective support of many hundreds of seats.

But our thread does not stop with traditional IT infrastructure services. We think a similar transformation is occurring with the application development industry. Consider:

• A stable, enterprise caliber Microsoft 2003 platform provides directory services; file / print; messaging, SQL, security (including ISA server), and SharePoint Portal Server.
• A common development environment, •net, that has access to a library of high level functionality from any of the core services.
• Development of useful custom business applications become possible within a matter of days or weeks time, in contrast to the months or years required not long ago.

In a sense, application development has become a commodity as well!

We are optimistic about the future of IT. We identify two roles:
Commodity service (professional delivery of enterprise services). All businesses may now expect a stable, available, secure basic computing environment, providing file / print services, desktop, messaging, database and Internet services. Cluster, fault tolerant, and network storage solutions are within reach of many medium size businesses. Even without these high availability tools, however, good design and professional services can be expected to deliver reliable service.		Potential (next generation, new frontier): This is the exciting, yet to be developed role of IT. Businesses that embrace new ways of utilizing technology will have the competitive advantage that was once held by those companies 20 years ago who were the early adopters of the first generation of IT. Business critical applications that are developed in the next few years will take strong advantage of enterprise caliber secure services, tremendous computational capacity, and very strong development tools. Areas of interest today include Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence.

How do we fit in?
	IT as a commodity	Next generation
Collaborative Consulting Services	CCS can support your staff, delivering on projects to migrate to or implement a new technology, serve as the technology expert to which your staff is free utilize as needed, and to work with your business leadership to strategically plan IT technology within the context of your business, addressing service and availability requirements through technology, best practices and good operational procedures.	Consistent with our vision of the future of technology, we believe that next generation projects must address both the underlying infrastructure and development of new applications. We develop comprehensive projects with select application development partners, in which our role is to design and implement a stable operating environment and supporting infrastructure to host the new application. This may include migration of servers and workstations to a 2003 platform, development of a SAN or other storage and backup infrastructure, security, business continuity, availability, security, and secure delivery of services to your customers or business partners.
Managed Technology Services	TMS can take responsibility for a portion of your IT services, such as user help desk, desktop or server support, or you can turn your entire network over to Collaborative. Regardless, we will customize a Service Level Agreement to fit your needs and deliver responsive service at a predictable monthly fee.	We speak to the future here, though we believe it is the near future. We believe that we and our partner companies can deliver to small businesses new applications that deliver on growing technology in the areas of collaboration, business intelligence and knowledge management. The trick is to figure out the details, and that is the part of the current transformation that we find exciting. And we hope that you will be among those companies who explore this path, finding new ways to do business that place you at the top of your discipline.