Magnet 360

Make Your Tech Budget Go Further with Hybrid IT

I’ve had the good fortune of helping customers build their businesses online since the early 90s. Along the way, we’ve built a lot of applications that run the gamut from modest in scale to full enterprise level.

Years ago, the reality was that most larger projects allocated a substantial portion of their budgets to infrastructure and a relatively small portion of the budget to unique features and functions. It was just the way applications were built, and most people didn’t give it a second thought. But today, as the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms like Salesforce.com have gone mainstream, it has become common for the core software or infrastructure to be leased and for features to be configured rather than coded. As a result, we spend less time and budget re-inventing the wheel by building on top of capabilities that already exist. Using these technologies, we’re able to allocate a dramatically smaller portion of the budget to infrastructure and can build solutions faster, with more resources available to configure high-level features and functions that add value for our customers.

To help explain why this shift is so significant, let’s step back for a moment and talk about the tension that has historically existed between business users and traditional IT. Business users always want more features and more functions in less time and for less money. For IT, this need for speed and economy is a problem: they already have way too much to accomplish with the resources available. Matt Meents, the CEO of Magnet 360 member Reside writes on his blog about the $500 billion IT gap, which lies in this abyss between Business Needs and IT.

Magnet360 has found a way to close the gap with something we call Hybrid IT. This area is where the cloud and SaaS can solve problems faster and cheaper than the previous generation of solutions and approaches. For business users, new initiatives can be launched at great speed. For IT, systems can be secured, scaled, and integrated safely within these pre-existing back-end infrastructure systems. The result is that both sides’ burdens are eased while business needs for all parties are met.

At Magnet 360, we welcome this shift and enjoy guiding our customers through the opportunities they have to capitalize on it. Using this philosophy of Hybrid IT, we’ve helped small entrepreneurial clients create an unprecedented level of features, functions and infrastructure on a tight budget. We’ve also helped larger Fortune 500 organizations launch new business services in a matter of months—much quicker and more efficiently than we could have done it using the traditional IT model.

To learn more about how we’ve used Hybrid IT to align business and technology needs for a variety of clients, including a new service offering for 3M Commercial Graphics, contact us today. We’d be happy to share our success stories and explain in greater depth how Hybrid IT can make your tech budget go further than you ever thought possible.