“It has definitely been a very confronting month at Leap with the passing of Leigh’s wife. However the level of response, care and support has been extremely moving and on behalf of Leigh, I want to personally thank all of you. I understand a number of people supported Leigh and Janelle’s wish to donate to Solaris Care and if any of you have not had a chance yet I encourage you to do so online at http://solariscare.org.au

On the business front we continue to see the impact of the move of email to the cloud. In fact in the last 3 months all of our projects for email have only been for those clients moving their email servers to the Internet. Microsoft has now accelerated this trend with the announcement of their new range of Small Business Server products. The new Small Business Server 2011 Essentials edition is actually specifically designed to support email via Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online suite. Part of this movement has been driven by the significant cost savings but it is also for reasons like a 99.9% uptime guarantee backed by a cash reimbursement if the Service Level Agreement isn’t met. Even the Australia Government is now planning for widespread adoption with the Federal Department of Finance and Regulation outlining plans to allow government agencies to “choose cloud based services if they demonstrate value for money and are adequately secure”.

Other big news is the Apple iPad 2 has now been launched and should be available to order by the end of this month. While the iPad currently has an estimated 91% of the Australian tablet market (at the end of 2010) there has been a lot of buzz that Google based tablets will shrink this considerably in 2011. Our opinion at Leap and being somewhat biased with four in use by staff is that the market share will remain high given Apple’s ease of use and more dramatically not a single person or client has asked us to setup a Google tablet yet! A number of you are already using iPad’s in your business and what we are seeing is the volume of inquiries and setup requests is growing monthly, so a new model will no doubt speed that up again. If you would like to see an iPad in action in a business setting please contact your Account Manager to arrange a demo.

Have a great March!

“Well after a lot of planning and preparation I am pleased to announce that Leap has implemented extended support hours. Our office is now able to take inbound support calls from 7.30am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday. This is a result of direct feedback from our discussions with many of you on what we could do to improve our service offering. In addition we are also launching our After Hours Support Service. Priced at $11 Per User Per Month Inc GST (with a minimum of 10 users) we will now be on-call between 6pm to 10pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays for those that take up the service. After Hours rates will apply for any actual calls so please speak with your account manager for more details.

In an example of the changing marketplace Google’s Android operating system for phones has now replaced Nokia’s as the most used Smartphone in the world. While many of us are still to even adopt a smartphone the race is on between Google and Apple to dominate the market with Nokia, Blackberry and Microsoft all losing share as a result. The question is what kind of policy do you have in your company around these types of phones? Not only can they have email and Internet on them and be connected to your network but they can also store files and data quite easily. We have a number of clients who are running iPhones for staff and the reality is it is being pushed by staff as a right of employment. However if you don’t have some acceptable use policies in place you could be exposing your company to unnecessary risk or alternatively disgruntled staff.

We have had some changes in Leap recently with one of our account managers Shaun relocating back to Melbourne with his fiancé. As a replacement Nathan from our technical team has opted for a change and moved into this role to take over where Shaun left off. Whilst Nathan is new to the account management role given his technical background and experience with Leap in the last 2 years we think he will hit the ground running as he already familiar with most of your businesses.

Also a big thanks to the accountants who came along (we had a full house) to our recent breakfast seminar. We have had a lot of positive feedback and questions and will look to run another similar event in May.

Have a great February!

Leigh didn’t end up making it to Orlando in the USA with me and I got caught in the A380 grounding on the way home but the trip was definitely eye opening and worthwhile none the less. A key takeaway for us is the significant change and turmoil we can expect in the next 12 – 24 months in the IT industry and for those clients who depend on IT in their business (most of you). We are already beginning to see the start of that with a shift from services in the office to the cloud (Internet). Our belief is the NBN will exponentially speed up this shift but it will happen even if that doesn’t come to fruition.

US based Gartner group put together some predictions for 2015 around this type of shift and came up with 5 key items:

• 10 per cent of your online friends will be non-human.
• Tools and automation will eliminate a quarter of IT labour hours.
• IT spending per head will rise by 60 per cent in “information-smart” businesses.
• Companies will generate half of online sales through social networks and mobile applications.
• 20 per cent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers and 80 per cent of enterprises using external cloud services will demand independent certification that providers can restore operations and data.

Back home here in Aus in the Dec/Jan 11 edition of the National Accountant magazine there was an a good article summarising the shift and explaining what it is as well as showcasing how it saved one client nearly $30,000 in efficiencies in one year.

A recent local example is a number of our clients here in WA have moved their email from being on an Exchange server in-house to running on Microsoft’s own Online Services platform on the Internet which is currently available in 22 countries worldwide. This trend will continue to spread and is literally like taking icons off your desktop and putting them into your web browser which are then accessible at your PC in the office, laptop at home, iPhone in a café or mobile tablet in a customer’s office. Previously this would require a significant investment but now that kind of access can be had for less than $10 a staff member per month.

For a more down to earth topic here at Leap we will be open over the Christmas period except for public holidays so support coverage will still be available and operational. If your office is going to be closed please make sure you have let our staff know so we can plan accordingly if we pick-up anything with your systems whilst you’re away.

On behalf of Leigh and I and all the team at Leap we wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

Zaun Bhana
Operations Director