As IT consultants, you may recall that in the early to mid-90s, leading PC vendors began segmenting their product lines into two or three distinct tiers to meet the demands of the different needs of consumers.

IT Consultants Have Different Component Levels to Choose From

As the domestic and global market demand for desktop PCs, notebooks and servers began to soar, top PC vendors such as Compaq (now Hewlett Packard), Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard and IBM wanted to have PC products that would be highly relevant and compelling for various needs and budgets.

The Different Options

Enterprise customers, such as Fortune 1000 network man-agers, would pay premium prices but require incredible amounts of scalability, reliability and availability, stable and mature hardware configurations, as well as ease of manage-ability.

Home users would need rock-bottom prices to entice first-time buyers, as well as bleeding edge hardware components for gaming, digital photography, video capture and other Internet-era hobbies.

Small business users would need something in between -- not too stripped down, not too loaded up, but a very good mid-range value.

IT Consultants Can Compare Specs

Fortunately, the PC vendors also have made identifying appropriate products easier for both you and your clients. When researching PC configurations online for your clients, PC vendors Web sites almost always will have separate Web pages and sections for each of these three market segments. This helps to make sure IT consultatns inadvertently dont recommend a PC with the wrong set of features.

IT Consultants Can Profit From White Box Computer Sales

A big percentage of small businesses Worldwide purchase white-box or clone PCs from local computer resellers, integrators and IT consultants. Visit the major PC vendors Web sites periodically to see how your firms recommended small business PC configurations and price points compare to what the major PC vendors offer.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Small Business Computer Consulting .com. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}