Million Dollar Infrastructure for $100 a month...

In my previous life (before starting BluIntelligence) I was/am an IT guy.  I was Director of Enterprise Software Development at my last company prior to their acquisition and Head of Global IT at a software company prior to that.  My life since 1991 revolved around developing and deploying large infrastructure projects.  Siebel, Oracle, JDE, SAP and Microsoft tools are all in my bag of tricks and I have an extensive network of contacts at all of  these companies, not to mention the scores of former employees I could call upon to help with projects.

So in January of this year when I decided to start my own company you'd think I would rely on what I learned from deploying all of these solutions wouldn't you?  The truth is, I did.  I chose none of them.  The secret to my Million bucks worth of infrastructure is not to make the mistakes I helped others make at both start-ups and fortune 500 companies.  For those of you starting your own company, here's my little secret.

Let someone else run your shop...sounds simple doesn't it?

I'll get into more detail in future posts, but this is what our infrastructure consists of today:

1. Email:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  We access our mail either pop3 or web-mail.
2. Web Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost
3. Application Hosting:  Hosted through ActiveHost.  Our application we run our business on is hosted at our same provider.
4. Customer Extranet:  We use BaseCamp.  Awesome tool to provide our deliverables and communicate with our customers.
5. Internal Applications:  For everything else we use JotSpot, my personal favorite (a Wiki).  It has our CRM system, our requirement management, our team project deliverables, and our primary collaboration tool.

As a start-up we have the same application any larger company would have without the servers (we do have a file server for local files), application management, data center, or network infrastructure.  We also consider ourselves more agile due to our environment choices.  We're moving into our new office space this week, which means we're moving printers and laptops, not an entire computing environment.

I've personally purchased and deployed all of the enterprise solutions mentioned above and can tell you from experience we have all of the functionality in our hosted products (out of the box) as we would have had if we had purchased Siebel, Oracle or SAP (out of the box).  Just to put the cost into perspective, at my last company I paid $264,000/year in maintenance to run Siebel and had a team of 5 developers who made between $70,000 to $100,000 a year.  On top of that the production environment had 13 servers (test had 6) and was running on Oracle databases and EMC storage.  (And that's just one application)

Joe Kraus (yeah, the Exite guy) who is the CEO of JotSpot makes the point very clear in his blog.  I'll take it one step further though, it's teams like Joe's and Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com who are driving our start-up costs and companies like ours down even more than what they're experiencing.

My most important point in all of this is that outsourcing your infrastructure and application needs to a company whos sole business is to manage them will allow you to get on with your core business. 

The key question is:  "If this is so great why aren't more companies doing this"?  The answer is very simple, FEAR.  I'll answer this in more detail as well as give you some insight into what has become of the IT profession since the bubble burst in future posts, it's shocking.