A month and a half past the Windows 7 launch we caught up with one of our Windows 7 partners, Carl Mazzanti, CEO for eMazzanti Technologies, to hear how small and midsize businesses are benefitting from Windows 7. For more information on how small and midsize businesses are deploying Windows 7, check out this PressPass story and if you’re a small or midsize business you can check out our Windows 7 Business Site for detailed information.
Sandrine Skinner: Tell me about eMazzanti Technologies.
Carl Mazzanti: We work with small and midsize businesses (about 90 percent of our customer base has 100 or fewer PCs) to help them use technology to their best advantage. We operate in the New York Metropolitan area with clients in several countries.
Sandrine Skinner: What kind of demand are you seeing for Windows 7 among small and midsize businesses?
Carl Mazzanti: We already have a thousand-hour backlog of deployment commitments, with many of these already paid for in full. It’s great that the hardware requirements for Windows 7 is the same as it was for Windows Vista – small businesses can really stretch their IT budgets and most people feel like they got a brand new computer when they switched to Windows 7. That said, about half are buying new hardware and there are some cool new PCs out right now for small and midsize businesses. I expect attention will become even more focused on hardware next year.
Sandrine Skinner: What’s the main reason your customers are upgrading to Windows 7?
Carl Mazzanti: The value to the customer is very clear: it helps businesses work the way they want, get more done and it safeguards their work. Every time you save productivity is real money saved for businesses, and this matters in any economy. And for small businesses, we usually recommend Windows 7 Professional – this version offers a good value and the key features small businesses need without paying for features they don’t need. Windows 7 has features like Advanced Backup, Encrypting File System (EFS) for data protection, Location-Aware Printing, the ability to run older productivity applications through Windows XP Mode, and the ability to securely connect to different company networks with Domain Join.
Sandrine Skinner: Can you give us some examples of customers that are benefitting from Windows 7 Professional?
Carl Mazzanti: We have a manufacturing customer with a large sales force – so these guys are always on the go, visiting customers, and they constantly need to connect to a network and also print documents from anywhere (customer’s site, car or home office). Easily connecting to a network, the location-Aware Printing feature and even the Presentation Mode feature in Windows 7 Professional saves them a few minutes in each location and saves them a lot of time in the long run.
Security is another real benefit. With Windows 7, you only start the services you need when you need them (called trigger start services,) so you massively decrease the potential for someone to find a security vulnerability. Windows Defender in Windows 7 Professional helps keep businesses up and running by offering enhanced protection from Internet threats, spyware, and other forms of malicious software. Real estate offices really benefit from this security since they do so much of their business online. Real estate agents go through PCs like they’re going out of style and need their computers to perform. They can’t risk being in the middle of a closing and have their PC go down because of malicious software.
Sandrine Skinner: What do you find most important to small and midsize businesses when it comes to technology?
Carl Mazzanti: Businesses are interested in getting more out of what they already have. The reality is that many businesses need to get more done with less staff and leverage existing infrastructure, and Windows 7 Professional helps them do that.
As you can see, small and midsize businesses are already reaping the benefits of Windows 7 Professional. Stay tuned for more customer and partner stories.