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Embracing Flexibility for Good 21 April 2013
21 April 2013: We certainly have clients now who are ambitious to secure a fully virtualised ICT set-up and who understand the business benefits. Some of them are quite literally starting from scratch but they tend to have a clear idea of where they need to get to.
Leslie Faughnan reports in the Sunday Business Post.

IT Force are specialists in ICT contracting and projects, including virtualisation. “The real wave of virtualisation in medium-sized enterprises in Ireland is only now under way,” said Joe Molloy, director of managed services. “Most of them have certainly been looking at virtualisation, some have invested in server consolidation, but the real movement is in the last couple of years.

“That said, we certainly have clients now who are ambitious to secure a fully virtualised ICT set-up and who understand the business benefits. Some of them are quite literally starting from scratch but they tend to have a clear idea of where they need to get to.”

Joe Molloy, Director of Managed Services

Molloy said that the late start in virtualisation, at least from an ICT industry point of view, is not necessarily because managers were doubtful about the technology. “Very tight budgets were and possibly still are the biggest obstacle, so they didn’t fix what was not broken. Another factor is that quite a few had invested in ICT when times were good, so their hardware and systems were not out of date in any serious way.”

Many SMEs depend on specialist applications that were not readily amendable to virtualisation until quite recently, Molloy said, for example CAD systems in architectural and engineering practices. “It’s fair to say that the principal driver for virtualisation today is its potential contribution to improved company performance, doing things smarter and better, rather than the purely economic business case. Another factor, which strictly speaking is secondary, is business continuity. SMEs have become acutely conscious of how much they depend on their systems to survive. They understand the ease and reliability that virtualised systems bring to that. In the same vein they tend to recognise that once they are virtualised, changes and improvements can be made readily and quickly. Having survived hard times, doing more with less continues to be their mantra for the future.”
Candidate Referral Scheme 05 April 2013
05 April 2013: IT Force has announced a new Candidate Referral Scheme! If you refer someone to us that we place you will receive a gift voucher!
If you refer someone to us that we place (either permanently or in a contract of 6 months or more), you will receive a gift.

The rules are easy and straight forward:
- The candidate put forward cannot already be on our database
- It doesn’t count if they apply directly on our website or thought any other application means (via Monster/LinkedIN/Indeed etc.) before you submit them
- The candidate put forward must be placed within 12 months of your referral date
- The candidate must be authorised to work in Ireland
How the scheme works:
- You submit your friend’s name/CV to HR and they can confirm if they are on our database already. If we don’t already have them, you pass on the full details.
- If they are subsequently placed, you are eligible for a gift 4 weeks after they start.
Referral gift T&C’s:
- IT Force reserves the right to offer an alternative reward of the same value at any time
- IT Force’s decision is final
Please contact Elizabeth Lenihan to avail! She can be contacted on elizabeth.lenihan@itforce.ie or on +353 (0)1 5546 044.

Start sending in those CVs!
BYOD Education is Key for SME's 02 March 2013
02 March 2013: According to Joe Molloy, director of managed services at IT Force, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon has been around for a lot longer than most people think.
Gerry McElligott from the Sunday Business Post reports:

According to Joe Molloy, director of managed services at IT Force, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon has been around for a lot longer than most people think.

Molloy said that he’d noticed the trend beginning to pick up steam at least three years ago. The only difference between then and now was that it didn’t have a name yet.

Executives in client companies were beginning to bring in an increasing range of their own devices in to the workplace, and expecting that their IT departments or managed services providers will be able to support them at a moment’s notice. Smartphones, tablets and even additional laptops were all being thrown into the mix.

These days, it’s not just the executives who are beginning to tote around an increased amount of hardware. It can be anyone in the organisation. Molloy said if you look at the average SME, in a typical 20 user organisation, you can expect to come across almost double that number of devices, i.e. nearly two devices per head.

As a managed services provider, he didn’t have any major problem with clients using additional devices in the workplace.

However, he said that if people didn’t go about it the right way, it could cause problems. In his experience, many organisations find themselves entering a BYOD situation on an ad-hoc basis. In other words, no decision is made centrally and people just tended to show up with a new device and expect it to work with a company’s system from the get-go.

“It wasn’t even a case of them telling us that they are introducing new devices,” Molloy said. “They would ring us up and say, ‘I’ve a problem with my device and can’t get my email’. We’re logging on to a system we think is the original laptop, and then ten minutes into it we realise that it’s an iPad or a new laptop. So we’re asking them, ‘When did you get that?’ and they’ll say ‘yesterday’. In small businesses, that’s the reality. We’re now trying to educate the user base.”

Molloy said that the main issue for customers is that productivity can suffer while issues are being ironed out. If a service provider knew in advance that new devices were on the way, there would be an opportunity to set everything up in advance to avoid any issues.

“Like any other managed service provider, we’ve enhanced our technology in how we can deal with this,” he said. “We can now monitor the endpoint.

“When a client introduces a device for the first time, we can actually see it and we can head it off at the pass by setting them up.”

Want to learn more about our BYOD services? Contact us here and Joe Molloy will get back to you!
Not Everyone is Being Charmed by Cloud 03 February 2013
03 February 2013: The time when the cloud option really makes sense is when it’s time to refresh the IT estate, according to Molloy.
Ian Campbell of the Sunday Business Post reports:

IT Force is a progressive IT services company that is quick to spot emerging technology trends that could benefit its small and mid-size business customers. The cloud fits the bill which is why it has invested time and training to make it part of its product and service portfolio. Sometimes, however, it proves to be a hard sell.

“We have scenarios where we introduce hosted solutions as a potentially cheaper alternative to traditional IT, but we see a lot of companies that are afraid of it. Despite the cost advantages, they stick with the old ways of working,” said Joe Molloy, director of managed services at IT Force.

A case in point was a customer looking to upgrade its office software. Despite IT Force introducing the idea of SaaS and outlining a plan for using Google Apps, which would have delivered dramatic savings, the firm went for the latest version of Office and a new server.

“We have trained engineers and cloud aggregators as partners to create new opportunities, but we still come across customers who want to buy hardware the old way,” said Molloy.

He is not disillusioned with the cloud; he’s just learning to be patient. IT Force has no doubt that cloud services will prevail, and it banking on it, but not as quickly as some of the large vendors would have us believe – certainly not in the SME space.

The time when the cloud option really makes sense is when it’s time to refresh the IT estate, according to Molloy. To make the right choices organisations need to analyse how the business will progress over the lifecycle of the next investments. “They need to think about the number of people they are likely to be employing at the end of four or five years, and how the business might grow,” said Molloy.

His argument is that, if they do it properly and anticipate growth, then the flexibility of cloud services makes more sense. You can scale the business as an operational cost, rather than having to continually fork out for new hardware.

Such benefits are harder to sell than simple cost savings. And the reality is that some cloud services are not guaranteed to be cheaper than their traditional counterparts. Microsoft Office is a case in point.

“I did two implementations recently,” said Molloy. “To do it properly, to match like-for-like with what you would get running the software on site, it takes much longer to do the cloud implementation from an engineering point of view,” said Molloy.