Home based businesses - shaping Information Technology solutions for the future.

The work from home dream has come to fruition! Home based businesses are now in the best ever position to give the corporate giants out there a run for their money. In a development that seems to be gaining great popularity, and perhaps a sure sign of things to come, work from home entrepreneurs are showing the world how technology ought to be used. Theyve embraced the internet and are dictating how to put it to work instead of working through it -- a trend leaving many a NASDAQ giant green with envy.

Corporate Road Warriors" have been dreaming of The Internet Office for the past few years - or is it called The Virtual Office nowadays? Whatever we decide to call it today or tomorrow, for most corporate employees it is still just pie in the sky and will more than likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

While office employees are queuing to use the communal coffee machine at the designated dining area back at headquarters, work from home entrepreneurs are making amazing fortunes running their internet based businesses while vacationing in Hawaii, or even from the kitchen table at home -- basically from any place where they can access the internet. The only overhead is an internet access bill, there are no employees to pay, no need to rent office space -- absolute Moneymaking Utopia.

The ever increasing demands placed on parents are getting people to seriously consider alternatives to corporate life. We see press releases about support groups for working parents popping up all the time like http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/7/prweb74364.htm - the issues facing these people are very real but are not unique to parents. Corporate life for most people is extremely demanding and stressful due to its dictatorial nature. In contrast, owning and running a home business allows the flexibility to adjust ones work life around family life or around an active social schedule -- eliminating the stresses related to having a clock-watching manager on your back.

Groups like http://www.homeworksystems.com are helping people to set up home businesses with a proven track record. Other members of the home business community are content with just sourcing wholesale goods and then selling it off via www.ebay.com for a profit. Strangely, major companies and organizations, some of them NASDAQ listed, have seen the potential and are offering help and solidly backing business affiliate websites run by ordinary individuals like http://www.slim-factory.com. Websites like http://www.wahm.com are targeting mothers who want to work from home with another site due to be launched to target fathers with similar goals.

Where were headed seems pretty much a clear cut path -- seemingly established corporate giants are folding every day and staff layoffs are commonplace, whilst home based businesses are showing marked growth. I guess with home businesses, its hard to lay yourself off, and probably even harder not be motivated to work especially if your effort directly affected the size of your pay packet. If you think about this for a minute, then it makes sense that a booming market like this should drive and dictate how technology should work for us.

The reason for the slow, and in some cases non-existent, deployment of The Internet Office in the corporate environment tends to mostly be cost driven. Most companies have spent the last decade or so, tightening up security to ensure that people cant get to the precious resources hosted on the internal network. Massive fortunes have been spent on WAN security with the likes of Cisco Systems, and other router and firewall vendors.

The idea with The Internet Office is almost the opposite -- i.e. to allow people access to resources on the internal network, from any place outside of the office, whether it be from home or an internet cafe. So these companies have to literally fork out millions to undo the security theyve put in place and modify it. Introducing VPNs and Layer 3 or 4 switches to accomplish the job does not come cheap if you factor in the manpower and potential for error.

For the work at home entrepreneur, these obstacles are almost non-existent. The only real requirement they have to run their business is for a computer with an internet connection. Obviously there are processes involved with securing and backing up of that website and ensuring availability, but that responsibility lies with the company hosting the website. The terms of agreement between the hosting company and the site owner are always geared in favour of the site owner -- and all this at the fraction of the cost of trying to do it and manage it in-house as the corporate world is used to doing.

I fully expect to see technology vendors looking to provide solutions to the home business market if they want to go where the money goes.