"Community partners are things like local chambers of commerce, local offices of the Small Business Administration, local small business lending companies, etc., who already have relationships with small businesses in a metro area," says Thompson. "Small businesses have come to trust those organizations for help and guidance with their growth. And what we found is that when we create an environment where the small business community and the reseller can come together, you generate more trust in what we're trying to accomplish, and you have a way for resellers to reach out through an aggregator of contacts into their area. There are millions of businesses out there. It's easy to just target the biggest ones, but it's another thing to point them toward smaller sets of organizations within their community."

This community outreach speaks to Intel's desire to build a larger small business push than just an isolated contest. One of the company's key gateways in this space is the Reseller Small Business Resource Center (www.intel.com > Intel Reseller Center > Sales & Marketing Resources > Small Business Resource Center). To see this concept at work, click on the Platforms tab and pick, say, Intel Desktop Platforms For The Digital Office. Two platforms are offered: the Executive Series and the Classic Series. Executive platforms are "designed to maximize efficiency in the digital office by providing extra security, privacy, integrated protection, interoperability, and collaboration services" while Classic platforms "offer a cost-efficient solution for budget conscious businesses, with the stability and reliability associated with Intel products."

Gone But Not Forgotten AMD's Socket 939 platform, the basis of its current Athlon 64/FX lines, is due for imminent replacement by a new socket code-named M2. Fortunately, the AMD Commercial Stable Image Platform ensures that clients who bought 939 products recently will have their investment protected for at least 15 months.

Both of these platforms are based on the 945G chipset. Note that Intel doesn't blather on about dual core, SATA, the GMA 950 graphics core, front-side bus speeds, or any of that conventional rigamarole. You need to dig several clicks into the site before you can even access any of that information. Instead, Intel offers integration guides and videos, optimization tips, marketing collateral and demos, and so on. You start by picking the platform and the elements you need to succeed at selling the platform, not the products, follows from there.

This is what Intel says its customers are asking for. Many resellers come from technical backgrounds, and we tend to love the geeky side of this business. Some of us assume that our customers are the same way. Intel and Microsoft aren't denying that there's a time and place to indulge our inner engineers, but to gain revenue in the small business space, the basic platform approach, they say, is what's scoring sales.

Selling Small Biz On Stability

Nobody—not Grandma, not Johnny Tech-Guru, not the enterprise's CTO—nobody likes obsolescence, and most of us live in fear of it. It's bad enough when a $10,000 investment is only worth $5,000 a year later. But seeing your upgrade path whacked off at the knees because the platform was discontinued six months after purchase is even worse.

This has been a long-standing problem for major manufacturers as they seek to evolve their product lines. Take AMD. From the debut of Socket A (hey, whatever happened to Socket A?), AMD has preached the gospel of platform stability. The platform wouldn't be around forever, but you could count on it being around for a long time, long enough to realize a more than satisfactory ROI. Well, Socket 754's comparative two-hour layover ruffled more than a few feathers, and now its successor, Socket 939, is about to roll over for M2 (which will officially be called AM2, according to a recent Inquirer story) sometime in 2006. Far from a surprise, AMD has had M2 and its accompanying shift to DDR2 memory on the radar for a long time. The question was how to better handle this transition than in times past.

Enter the AMD Commercial Stable Image Platform (AMD CSIP) program, introduced last September (see www.amd.com/csip). "This is something we started with our system builders who are serving local markets," says AMD's John Morris, director of North America regional marketing. "It's a program that allows a system builder to build out a desktop that's going to be stable for a 15-month period. The challenge in supporting a small business community is that you want those desktops, for instance, to look and act consistently so you can service them. It's almost plug-and-play for replacement of parts and the image. Everything is consistent across the stations. We've worked with our motherboard and chipset partners to provide for stability of the image for a 15-month period. So a manager can go buy 50 systems from a local whitebox builder and be assured that the image is the same, so when the IT professional services those boxes, it's very easy and consistent."

Image stability essentially means that all manufacturers involved in the CSIP agree to make everything from driver patches to replacement parts available for at least 15 months. This is a particular draw to businesses that want to create standard configuration images. IT managers need only deploy one driver or stock one motherboard in the event of trouble. If the reseller happens to be the outsourced IT manager, even better. You can fulfill your monthly contracted service duties in less time because you know exactly what to bring to the job. CSIP platform participants include Atheros, ASUS, ATI, Broadcom, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI, and NVIDIA.

The Dynamic Duo NVIDIA's GeForce 6150 returns to chart-topping IGP graphics and a southbridge packed with features sure to please small businesses, everything from ultra-flexible RAID to best-of-breed Gigabit Ethernet.

"We are guaranteeing availability of that older 939-pin socket," says Morris. "Even though we're transitioning into M2, a reseller can go and find availability on the older product, whether that's motherboards or the processor itself."

NVIDIA decided to take AMD's CSIP idea and walk it a little further. The NVIDIA Business Platform (www.nvidia.com/nbp) syncs with AMD's calendar, guaranteeing at least a 12-month IT purchase cycle, but then defines a certification program with motherboard manufacturers and system builders. The company has a standardized testing methodology and a certification facility in India. This is essentially the sort of quality and stability assurance used in the workstation world now brought down to the desktop level for businesses.

Second Verse, Bigger Than The First Since AMD already had a 15-month processor platform guarantee in place, NVIDIA decided to go one better. The NVIDIA Business Platform assures investment protection to clients who buy an AMD CSIP processor plus NVIDIA's compliant chipset solutions along with all of the software that supports them.

"When a system builder takes an AMD CSIP processor," says NVIDIA product manager David Ragones, "combines it with an NVIDIA Business Platform-certified motherboard, and then combines that with the NVIDIA Business Platform-certified software driver package, they in turn can offer an NVIDIA Business Platform system to the small business consumer. A lot of times what a business owner is looking for in hardware and software is stability. They can qualify a system and then purchase identical systems throughout their purchase cycle with no need to worry about whether it will work within their environment."

According to NVIDIA, the NBP is the only stable PC image program accommodating both integrated and discrete graphics tailored to the VAR and reseller channel. The channel focus was done specifically because of this group's close ties to small business.

Whether NVIDIA's program is a greater asset in swaying small businesses than AMD's CSIP isn't really an issue. The two can be complementary.

Small Biz Product Niches

Security Baked In Part of what makes NVIDIA's nForce platform so appealing for small businesses is its integrated Active Armor firewall functionality, which runs from the core logic level, not the more vulnerable post-OS application level. The fact that Active Armor is essentially free is a big plus in small biz value equations.

We're not ready to leave NVIDIA just yet. All this strategy talk about platforms is essential, and abiding by it is likely to pay great dividends. But sometimes you just need to pitch products, and some products make a lot more sense than others when targeting the small business space.

One of our favorites in this category is NVIDIA's nForce chipset, particularly with the update to the new 6150 integrated GPU and the 430 MCP. Admittedly, businesses may not need the 6150 and its attendant TV encoder, HD playback, and integrated DVI output. The 6100 is likely a better fit in the business world. However, we do recommend the nForce 430 MCP over the 410 for one very key reason: ActiveArmor.

"nForce builds in what we call ActiveArmor, a hardware-based firewall," says NVIDIA's Ragones. "What that enables a PC owner to have is peace of mind that their PC will be protected from the moment it's turned on. This is distinct from other software-based solutions that can be disabled by the user as well as viruses that come in and attack the PC. The fact that our firewall is embedded is a key differentiator for us when talking with small businesses."

Also note that the 410 only offers 10/100 Ethernet while the 430 delivers Gigabit, something that shouldn't be underestimated for future network scalability. While this isn't the place to do an in-depth exposé on nForce, suffice it to say that the chipset platform carries plenty of secondary benefits. ActiveArmor firewall, besides being a more secure solution than most client-side firewalls, also delivers considerably lower CPU utilization, especially when under attack—an important selling point for businesses that value system efficiency and uptime. Unlike many competing chipsets, the nForce now supports 3 Gbps SATA, which in real-world terms isn't a big consideration today but will be in the next year or two. More important is the chip's support for RAID 5 as well as the GPU's adherence to NVIDIA's PureVideo technology. PureVideo is ostensibly aimed at home multimedia, but it can also be a powerful asset on business systems used for presentations. Mind you, all of this can appear on motherboards retailing for under $90, and that may be your biggest small business enticement of all.

In the nForce, you can find a clue as to one of the critical ingredients that make for a strong small business product. Robust firewall, advanced RAID support, Shader Model 3.0-class graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, and similar features were high-end specs not long ago. A business might well have paid hundreds of dollars above a baseline configuration for such functionality. The nForce more than any other core logic family has excelled in integrating such value-adds and making them essentially free. Additionally, no other company comes close to NVIDIA in making the software to administer such features simple enough for a small business exec—meaning the owner, salesman, and janitor—to set up, configure properly, and maintain. And few desktop-oriented companies tend to look as far forward as NVIDIA when planning business-class feautres.

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