An Introduction to “Going Virtual” with Your Technology Business

Nathaniel Richards

As the co-chair of Membership for EO Houston, I recently attended our Global Leadership Conference (GLC) in New Orleans, which is an annual summit for EO chapter board members from both North and South America. During one of the breakouts, Scott Jagger, founder and CEO of Ubertor (and several other companies) spoke about virtualizing and decentralizing your business using new technologies to manage the information.

In his talk, Scott covered several reasons that his company outsources/off-shores/automates everything they possibly can. And “it’s working for them, but could it work for me?” I began to question.

So as my company’s (www.entrancesoftware.com) lease in pricey downtown Houston (Google Map: 1001 McKinney St. Houston, TX 77002) is coming up for renegotiation in 6 months or so, I’ve started thinking about this more and more seriously…Here are the issues I’ve been mulling:

What does “going virtual” really mean?

Can all [tech] companies virtualize easily well?

How does a business owner weigh the value of virtualization? (costs/benefits?)

What are some practical ways to virtualize? (technologies, methodologies, techniques, etc.)

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to consider 3 basic levels of virtualization:

Full: Zero office space

Basic: Small central “war room”

Light: Extending presence of company virtually, without reduction in office space needs

In the coming weeks I will consider each of these models as well as answer the questions I have posed.