Technology Roadmap
April 13, 2007

This month NetSolutions created a technology roadmap for an internationally recognized designer and manufacturer of custom seals, precision rubber molded products, and custom mixed compounds. We’ve chosen to keep the company name confidential due to the specific content shared in this article.

Technology road mapping, a form of IT planning, has been instrumental in providing companies with competitive advantage. The roadmap serves to identify and develop the technologies required within a company and once these technology enhancements or new technologies are identified they can be developed internally or with the help of NetSolutions.

NetSolutions planned and coordinated several activities that expanded the IT infrastructure putting the company years ahead. The following projects/plans were completed as part of the roadmap:

• Server consolidation of 13 critical servers including servers in Mexico
• Active Directory implementation in US and South America
• Off-site disaster recovery project plan
• Blackberry remote server upgrade plan
• ISA proxy integration and upgrade
• Global server updates identifying existing firmware, drivers, & software:
• Server BIOS
• RAID Controller BIOS/Firmware
• HDD Firmware
• Backplane Firmware
• RAID Driver
• Motherboard drivers to complement Server BIOS
• OpenManage Application
• Dell ArrayManager
• Exchange archival & policy implementation
• Computer memory upgrades of all P4s to 1Gig
• Outsourcing plan for company website
• UPS calibration

Essentially the technology roadmap stems from the need to move the company’s technology forward as if they had both a CIO and CTO on staff making these decisions. Many SMBs don’t need a full-time CIO even if they could afford one. The technology roadmap provided answers to what technology could do, what tools do it best, and how to make it all happen. There are several projects still planned for 2008 including outsourcing the company’s website.