About Virtual Technologies
Virtual Technologies are business-to-IT consultants working primarily with SMEs and not-for-profits, especially membership associations.
Our goal is to help these organisations to make sound IT investments and, through those, achieve maximum business advantage.
We do this with business-led advice and guidance and by supporting pragmatic implementation in a very hands-on way.
By working with the systems that our clients already have, rather than seeking to replace everything, we can get results quickly and affordably.
How We Work
Although each client engagement is different, we like to start by working from business strategy to IS/ IT strategy. At the same time it is useful to carry out a survey of existing systems and discuss users' experiences with them. This typically results in a proposal to move forward.
Such proposals usually identify a series of projects designed for minimum cost and disruption which take the organisation from where it is to where it needs to be strategically.
Within the resulting projects we help to choose and then work with IT vendors and we also provide any additional resources and skills required for implementation and project management.
Background
Virtual Technologies is a network of freelance consultants with comprehensive Internet and IT skills. We are all highly experienced people, experts in the fields of business systems and online media. Our purpose is to bring you great flexibility and value for money in your implementation of intranets, extranets, public websites and general systems integration.
We adopted the virtual way of working from the outset, keeping our documents in secure online repositories and making full use of collaboration technologies such as Skype. This allows us great flexibility in putting projects together - skills on demand - while keeping our overheads as low as possible.
Unlike other consulting firms and web agencies we like to set our clients free to develop their own businesses as they wish. Internet technologies have now reached the point where this is a practical proposition and we are actively helping people to exploit that. We have demonstrated that, with the right architecture and tools, it is now practical for small companies with minimal technical resources to maintain and grow their own highly-interactive web presence, tightly integrated with their back-office systems.
Related Sites
|
Open Source vs. alternativesWe have to support Windows and Linux in order to be able to build on what our clients already have. We confess to a preference for open source because we demand the "right to repair" wherever possible. Having said that we need to do what's best for our clients. So when the best solution involves a proprietary product we'll happily work with that and have done so on many projects.
On our own desktops we have a variety of technology so we can evaluate different user experiences and implement on all client platforms. Okay, we do prefer Mac but we won't force it on anyone.
We think the future looks good thanks to the emergence of platforms such as Android and Chromium that aim to isolate the underlying hardware from applications. Even when these things are in production we expect to have to support everything that went before.
Find out more about open source from the Open Source Initiative.
|