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.