Do you dream of giving Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Symantec and all the rest of the pain-in-the-you-know-what techno giants the old heave ho? Well, potentially, now you can by entering the emerging world of small-business appliances that stuff computing and telephony into a single box.
All-in-ones combine the once-uncombinable–technologies like phone servers, file servers, file walls, routers and Web servers–into a single digital device that fits on any shelf. They’re not exactly cheap; units start in the $2,000 range. But they are far cheaper than the business technologies bought separately. And all-in-ones can be self-installed, easy to customize and powerful enough to support an entire small business’s techno-infrastructure.
“The idea is to keep complex business technologies as simple as possible so even the smallest firms can access enterprise-level tools,” says Shawn Chute, executive vice president at Sutus, the British Columbia-based integrated business device maker.
There are other cool startups worth knowing here–East Rochester, N.Y.-based Allworx and Fairfield, N.J.-based Critical Links–but Sutus makes probably the most representative device of the all-in-one market, the Business Central 200 (a three-person business will pay about $2,500 for a fully installed system). The