Facing up to it construction funds less than a CIO's free economics

Creative ideas in the free time

Could Web2.0 be used to slash it investments?

"IT manager World" in "IT Manager World" in the "2008 CIO most concerned about what" questionnaire, Zhu Mingsheng solemnly wrote the "creative solution to the problem of it construction funds seriously inadequate."

4 years ago, Zhu Mingsheng as chief information Officer of Jinling Hotel Co., Ltd. Redo it planning, with a connected industrial chain upstream and downstream of the central reservation system to rebuild the hotel management group's core competitiveness. For the Jinling Hotel, which manages the output as the main business model, it investment of 40 million yuan in 5 years is limited to the hotel assets of tens of billions of dollars, so Zhu Mingsheng has to be careful, such as adopting a low-cost, cost-effective PC server with less investment in domestic systems and solutions. Even so, he still felt stretched.

"In general, a reasonable proportion of IT investment should be software, hardware, and services accounted for 1/3, but we now have more than 60% hardware inputs." "To that end, Zhu Mingsheng's money-saving strategy is to spend all of its limited money on building core systems, while other it inputs are free or open source as far as possible." Fortunately, the development of Internet technology, so that he can easily find these free resources, and develop a "do not spend" it application mode.

Free mode under Web2.0

At the moment, Zhu Mingsheng's search for free IT resources is focused on the Web2.0 field, and the product or community platform offered by internet companies such as Google, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn is his focus. Today, he has applied Google's free enterprise suite to the Jinling group, which includes email (GMail), instant messaging (Google Talk), calendars, document collaboration, site (Sites), page Creator, and initial page features. Meet the enterprise at this stage of the basic needs of internal collaboration. This suite, together with the same free Skype network communication tools, WSS (Windows SharePoint Services, Chinese site templates) in the Windows system, and so on, form the "free" OA system at Jinling Hotel.

Now, Jinling Group employees are enjoying these free IT services. They use Gmail as their corporate mailbox, a single 6GB mailbox that can send large data messages easily and securely and stably. "This is more useful than the Exchange Enterprise mailboxes we used to use." "In addition, Gmail can also be associated with the calendar, Google Talk, and other features in Google's corporate suite, arranging meetings and sending reminders." In addition, as Google and Microsoft and other industry giants in the Enterprise E-mail field competition, its mailbox capacity and the possibility of expansion, the function will be more optimized.

Today, the Jinling Hotel group members of the hotel to convene a network of meetings is also free, they use Skype provided by the video conferencing system, only to be installed on the computer headset and camera, you can realize the computer and computer free call. If it is to show PPT-oriented meetings, such as training sessions, you just need to enable the document collaboration function, while the discussion, while in the PPT to make changes. This is supported primarily by two free systems: one is the document collaboration feature in the Google Enterprise Suite, which is primarily used to store daily documents that are not highly sensitive; those corporate documents are shared with WSS in Windows. It is possible to install a WSS service on a server without full load, "which is a free thought." If someone needs simultaneous video meetings and discussion of PPT modifications, both systems are enabled. For the general network training courses in the Enterprise, Zhu Mingsheng will record the training process, and then upload to the video community such as Youku, for the local colleagues to download, "so our system will not be overwhelmed by the large number of downloads."

Creative ideas in the free time

In the internet age, Zhu Mingsheng's free IT strategy has a strong theoretical foundation and a business environment to implement. Anderson, author of the Long Tail theory, defines the "free economics" of the Internet age-"as technology develops, providers of services or goods can reach large and even massive numbers of users, and the cost of delivering goods is very thin, The marginal cost of adding a single customer or adding a new service to each user is rapidly approaching 0.

Based on this theory of free economics, many internet companies have changed their profitability: they attract customers by providing free services, and then through the aggregation and distribution of traffic, advertising or value-added services for customers with more functional needs as their main revenue. For example, Google, Taobao, NetEase and other companies are typical of these companies, they provide free services or products, for Zhu Mingsheng to achieve free IT strategy provides a realistic possibility.

"For these internet companies and their customers, it's really what it takes--customers use basic services for free and pay if they need a better service." But for me, using basic services is enough. "Zhu Mingsheng jokingly called the Internet tycoon's business model" the esque of the internet age "--" Google is the martial arts warrior. Google opens up a lot of APIs (creator programming Interface, Application Interface), and we're looking at the possibility of using Google's cloud computing platform app to build a variety of free small e-commerce applications. Manage business processes and business data. ”

The growing sophistication of Internet commerce provides more and more "free" innovation space for Zhu Mingsheng. For example, the popular wiki (wiki) collaboration is now being considered for the knowledge management of Jinling group. In wiki mode, employees from the hotel can edit the same file and optimize the content together on the Internet. "If this mechanism can be perfected, it can become a platform for enterprise knowledge management." ”

This May, Zhu Mingsheng began planning to build a community for sale in a popular Facebook or LinkedIn community website. These communities store a wealth of personal data and integrate many applications, and businesses can build small applications within the community's open APIs. "We are trying this model to see if we can find our market in this community and get accurate personal customer information," he said. If you try to succeed, these communities can become my free CRM system and direct marketing channels. "Zhu Mingsheng said. At present, the business model is still in the exploratory stage.

There may also be integrated into the Jinling Hotel Group It platform is called "Second Life (Second)" virtual platform. Second Life creates a virtual world in which people in the real world can build their own virtual life. At present, many of the world's top 500 companies, including Cisco and IBM, have built their own virtual enterprise in this space and marketed products and brands to virtual people. Zhu Mingsheng extended the idea, he said, "Second Life" can be with his efforts to build the Jinling group E-commerce platform integration, for enterprise sales to add a community channel.

"I am considering whether I can spend some money to buy an island in Second Life, hire a virtual construction company to build a virtual jinling hotel, so that potential customers in the ' Second Life ' experience life, you can go directly to the virtual Jinling hotel experience, and even direct booking." "According to Zhu Mingsheng's design," Second Life "in the players walk into the virtual Jinling hotel, there will be a virtual waiter to provide them with face-to-face explanation, and take them to experience the room, visit the floor, feel the restaurant and so on. This virtual hotel will be connected to Jinling's central reservation system, supporting the direct order to the real Jinling hotel in the virtual reservation department.

"Every web2.0 community is a place where a lot of people congregate, and it can bring business." Zhu Mingsheng that "Second Life" is likely to develop into the Jinling Hotel group an important online distribution channels, and Jinling hotel only need to spend a small amount of money can build this channel, in addition to its community display function can also help Jinling hotel to save a lot of advertising promotion costs.

Zhu Mingsheng is thinking of another available community platform is Taobao, let customers directly in the Jinling Hotel Taobao shop to find real-time room status and to achieve reservations, is the next step of the Zhu Mingsheng plan.

Creative ideas in the free time

Limited free

"With free things, of course, there are defects, such as the business data into the enterprise, the risk is greater." "This is also the question that Zhu Mingsheng is considering how to solve." Now, he will only apply the free products of big-name companies like Google to take advantage of the privacy promises and security systems of these big businesses to maintain their data security. "Chinese people like to build their own systems, that the things in their hands is safe, in fact, this idea should be changed." "Corporate IT systems are connected to the Internet, and hackers can get all the data by hacking through your system," he said. This risk is a bit bigger than the risk of Google violating promises to steal or disclose corporate data. ”

In the choice to believe "big name" at the same time, Zhu Mingsheng also want to deal with the strategy--ready contingency plans, looking for alternative products. Today, IT service products to make his contingency plan to become a viable strategy, "Google has enterprise kits, Microsoft also has, once Google is not available, I quickly turned to Microsoft, as long as the data for the bulk export, import on the line." ”

The problem with using a free system is that it is difficult to integrate between systems, and each system needs to have a corresponding account, which is cumbersome to manage. Now, jinling Group meeting with free system, it needs to be deployed by IT staff, other talent can start to use. "It's just the people in it who will be in trouble. However, Zhu Mingsheng that these problems are secondary contradictions, "it is imperative that we do not spend or spend less to do things." "Free" preferences, so that the tall Zhu Mingsheng some "ge Lang" style.

"When the Internet Free Application becomes a trend, there will be technology vendors to provide a single sign-on solution, the Google, Skype and other unified, so that enterprises can use an account of these free resources." "In Zhu Mingsheng's view, once free it applications become a trend, there will be a resource-swap relationship between enterprise users and free platform providers: Companies provide content and traffic to platform providers, and platform providers can target these companies to advertise." Zhu Mingsheng believes that "free it applications will become a trend, and that the service of the provider will become better."

However, Zhu Mingsheng's free economics does not apply to all IT investments. He believes that the core business system of the enterprise must be invested money to build, only those for communication collaboration, management and enhance the efficiency of software, or small e-commerce applications, can use the free resources to do the work first.

"There is really no free lunch, and free economics is limited free, not completely free," he said. When I'm addicted to free features, I may be tempted to buy advanced features someday. "Zhu Mingsheng the idea with his own application experience--last year, he upgraded the 163 free mailboxes he used for years to paying VIP mailboxes," and the entire decision took only a few minutes.