Good news from the world of PCs for small business owners

Good news from the world of PCs for small business owners

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): First of all, here's a tip from a reader, Pak
Yosef Susilo, who has just e-mailed me and informed me of another
great program for managing Internet cookies.

It is called "Anonymous Cookie", and we can download it for
free from www.luckman.com. We all certainly thank Pak Yosef for
this tip, and let's continue sharing what we know about
additional protection. We can never overprotect ourselves when it
comes to surfing the Net.

Now, being sort of a home business owner myself, I want to
share good news with other small and medium-sized business
entrepreneurs in Indonesia who want to take advantage of the
computer in order to add leverage to their business.

The good news is that more PC vendors are ready to assist you
with your PC purchases so that you can start utilizing a computer
in doing business without having to rob the bank first.

As I wrote in this column some time ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP)
had promised to provide their services to small and medium-sized
enterprises, and now they have delivered on the promise.

At the end of last month, HP opened a Business Solutions
Center in Jakarta aimed at providing assistance to what they call
small office and small businesses.

These include any enterprise that does not have any internal
MIS support. The newly opened center is located on the first
floor of Jakarta Stock Exchange Building on Jl. Sudirman.

No less than the CEO himself, Lew Platt, came to inaugurate
it.

If you are a small business owner, you can visit this center
and ask for all the information you need. You can even request
financing for your PC purchases there.

Large PC vendors' stronger focus on small and medium-sized
businesses also constitutes a strategic move on their part.

As Platt mentioned in his address, last year the market for
small office and small business reached US$4.5 billion in Asia
alone.

According to him, one out of every 20 PCs and printers sold in
the region was sold to a small or medium-sized business.

By 1999, the market potential of this segment is expected to
comprise 24 percent of total investment in information technology
for the Asia-Pacific region.

In short, the small office/home office (SOHO) market is
undoubtedly a potential one for PC vendors.

For most start-up businesses, trying to find the right
information technology can be a quite challenging task, but the
rewards can be substantial.

Just last week I got the chance to see a demo of FACT -- an
integrated accounting software package -- presented by Turino
Fuad, and I could immediately see how small businesses could
streamline their financial processes and cut down on costs if
they used such a software package as this one.

However, small and medium business owners need to talk to
people to find out about it, and therefore the presence of a
source of information and assistance such as HP's Business
Solution Center is really good news.

Anyway, this company, which has been more widely known for
their printers, have also been doing increasingly well in the PC
sector.

As Fortune reported last month, HP has become the third
largest PC vendor worldwide.

In my article I reviewed Vectra 500, one of the most popular
PCs for small businesses.

It has also received rave reviews from various magazines
including my favorite Home Office Computing.

Just like them, I also liked the Vectra 500. But HP has
launched a replacement for it and it is called Brio.

HP has also launched three workstations for the SOHO community
and large enterprises as well.

HP Brio

The brand name chosen for this SOHO PC is quite an interesting
one.

It is clear that HP wants to impart the fact that they are now
targeting different segments of the PC market and that they've
introduced other names in addition to the already established
Vectra line.

The word "brio" itself, according to American Heritage
Dictionary, stems from the Italian and Spanish word brio and
means vigor or vivacity.

What a clever choice of word. To those who've never heard the
word before, they might automatically associate brio with the
word embryo.

That makes sense, too. After all, your small enterprise may be
the embryo of a multibillion dollar operation. You never can
tell.

The Brios are Pentium MMX based systems, which means you can
choose between the 200 MHz or 233 MHz version.

For sure, this level of power is more than sufficient for most
small and medium-sized businesses' requirements.

Like the Vectra 500, the pre-installed software and utilities
have been designed in such a way to minimize the learning curve
and to allow the new user to start working immediately.

It also contains all the necessary software drivers for HP
printers and network card. All you have to do is plug in the
device.

What is also special about this PC is that the keyboard is
equipped with 13 additional buttons located in the upper right
hand corner.

Using these buttons, you can directly call up many different
functions, such as starting Internet Explorer to access the
Internet, turning the speakers' volume up or down, and even
operating the 24X CD-ROM drive.

Incidentally, while browsing around in Challenger, the
computer superstore on top of Singapore's Funan Center, I saw a
similar keyboard on sale for about S$69 last week.

You see, here's another small but pretty useful innovation.

Kayaks

HP also enters the workstation market with its new line of
Intel-based PCs that they call Kayaks.

Three models are available: The Kayak XA is a single Pentium
II-based workstation, the Kayak XU is a dual Pentium II machine
and the Kayak XW is a dual Pentium Pro power tool. As you'd
expect, all the Kayaks have 512 KB of L2 cache.

There are other interesting new products for the SOHO
entrepreneurs as well.

There is a new DeskJet called 890C for professional use that
has a duty cycle of 3,000 pages per month. The top of the line
ScanJet 4C has now been replaced by a newer, faster scanner
called ScanJet 6100C.

As they introduced a new set of brand names for their PCs, HP
is also adopting a different name system for their other
products.

Expect to see further use of four digits for their products'
names in future.

One technical thing that is worth noting is that HP's new CD-
Writer, the SureStore 7100 Series, has been enhanced to tackle
the CD-RW (rewritable) as well.

HP told me that, unlike the other CD-Rewritable drive that
appeared earlier on the market, with HP's SureStore 7100i and
7100e it is not necessary to erase the entire contents of a CD-RW
if you want to modify just one single file.

So, fellow SOHO owners, with the available financing from the
large PC vendors you now have access to the basic as well as
advanced information technologies that you can capitalize on to
make your businesses grow faster. Now it will be your creativity
and shrewdness that determines how fast your company grows.