Suggestions for Our Customers and Partners on Year-End Spending

In “Five Tips for ‘Use It or Lose It’ Budgets”, Eric Thomas of CIO Insight discusses some ways that IT managers can improve the management of their budget processes. Eric talks about “use it or lose it” from his perspective:

“I often hear it from my clients in government, specifically from federal CIOs or IT managers. The phrase relates to their IT budget; if they don’t spend their money in the current year, it goes away the following year. … The impact of ‘use it or lose it’ or, more aptly, ‘spend it or lose it’ is most acutely felt during the budgeting process.”

With just over two months before the end of the calendar year, we want to ask current Cincom Smalltalk customers if they have “use it or lose it” funds that they need to spend before the page turns to next year. Here are a few quick ways in which we can encourage them to spend that budget while improving the value and profitability of their company or application:

• Product Upgrades
  There’s no need for our customers to risk a critical upgrade to a learn-as-you-go, in-house approach. Our senior consultants know the small, impossible-to-document steps that make the difference between an unresolved task and a completed process.
• Mentoring
  It’s easy to learn the basics of installing and using Cincom Smalltalk. But the most productive use is best achieved through customized mentoring for our customer’s experience level, developed specifically to meet their needs.
• Troubleshooting
  Whether it’s identifying and resolving a processing glitch or improving a performance drag, we have experts who can work with our customers remotely and/or on-site to re-create the problem and then provide an alternative viable approach.
• Performance Enhancement
  A performance-enhancement service reveals how a team is using Cincom Smalltalk, which aspects of the tool they are not using and how they could energize so many more existing capabilities.
• Migrations
  Cincom Smalltalk Services can move our customers’ application suites to the most productive Cincom Smalltalk programming environment, giving them fully scalable, web-based and client-server development enhancements. 
• Proof of Concept
  An on-site proof of concept using customer data and meeting their business goals will provide that last element of confirmation about which Cincom Smalltalk product will be needed for their application.

Suzanne recently discussed this valuable topic fresh off of a customer meeting. Watch part one of Suzanne’s interview here.