Old Guard Companies Serve Businesses of Your Size

"Hewlett-Packard generates about a third of its revenue from the small- and medium-sized business market," says Chris Ogburn, the company's director of small and medium business sales in North America, "and that includes everything from ProLiant servers to small-scale color printers." He adds that the company estimates that nine out of ten small and medium businesses own an HP product.

Buell Duncan, IBM's general manager of ISV and developer relations, says that over 20 percent of his company's revenue comes from the sector, and it's growing. "We're seeing growth rates of 10 percent or more per year," he says, "and that's compared to IDC's estimate of eight percent for the sector and five and a half percent for technology overall."

This is very good news for people like you: It means you'll be offered a steady diet of quality products by companies you can reasonably believe will be there for years to come. That's particularly important because both Hewlett-Packard and IBM are focused not just on hardware, but on technology services that will help you grow your business.

Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard has an array of products and services that are delivered under the umbrella of its Smart Office Framework. "There are three basic legs supporting the framework -- Smart Advice, Smart Technology, and Smart Services," says Ogburn.

HP customers, or people who are considering buying an HP product, can go to the company's Web site and chat with a technical support person. For more in-depth counseling sessions, telephone support is also freely provided by the company to its customers. But before you do any of that, you can take online courses or just read the tutorial documents for any number of technologies available for small businesses from Hewlett-Packard.

"Smart Advice is very important for businesses that don't have much in the way of IT resources," says Ogburn. He added, "Where else can you go for telephone advice if you didn't even use a consultant to install your technology?"

It's no surprise that Smart Technology is comprised of the foundation products in Hewlett-Packard's enormous hardware and services portfolio. Everything from an inkjet cartridge to a PDA to security services are in the portfolio and made easily available to businesses of your size. Some products come in a variety of formats that can grow with your business. HP StorageWorks Data Protector Express, for example, is a purpose-built data backup and recovery designed to enable a business of your size to protect its data from disaster regardless of operating system or hardware configurations, and without any traditional IT support to operate it.