Small Business Has a Big Appetite for Digital and Social Media Marketing

Small business adoption of technology-based solutions rarely keeps pace with the expectations of vendors, analysts and pundits. When it comes adoption of digital marketing and social media tools, however, small business adoption is fast and furious.

Recently, we (Hurwitz & Associates) conducted a survey sponsored by email marketing vendor Campaigner. The survey investigates how North American small businesses with 1-20 employees are adapting their marketing plans and budgets to compete more effectively in the future. While we uncovered many interesting trends in the first report in a two-part series, Small Business Marketing Health Check (available here), one of the most eye-opening findings is that small businesses are rapidly shifting their marketing initiatives from traditional media to digital marketing media tools, including social media, such as blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc., email marketing, search engine marketing and webinars and podcasts (Figure 1). While traditional media, such as direct mail, tradeshows and newspaper advertising still have a part in many small businesses’ marketing playbook, they are being overshadowed by digital and social marketing alternatives.

Figure 1. Small Business Use of Marketing Tools

Why are small businesses, who usually take a long time to shift gears, so fast out of the gate in this case? In a nutshell, it’s because digital and social marketing solutions deliver on the cheaper, faster, easier and better promise that so many other technology-based solutions don’t deliver on. These marketing tools are often less expensive to use than such traditional marketing options as print advertising and direct mail—a small investment can help companies significantly boost marketing reach and return. Digital and social media marketing tools give small businesses more immediate visibility into whether they’re reaching their target audiences, and easier ways to track and measure payback on the time and money they’re investing than traditional media. You can also rapidly adjust and refine campaigns and outreach as needed.

So, with their appetite whetted, what will leading-edge small businesses be looking for next to take their digital and social media marketing game to the next level? Here are some of the areas that I think hold great opportunity for growth as small businesses appetite in this area increases:

• More targeted search optimization and management. Services that are tailored to help specific kinds of small businesses achieve very specific results from their search engine marketing campaigns. For instance, Lotusjump provides a service to help small businesses optimize organic search results for hundreds or thousands of keywords to generate more qualified leads. The automated service automates the process of building more qualified leads based on more specific “longtail” search terms. Yodle, meanwhile, focuses on SMBs with local services business harness existing demand, by helping them to create a Web site, develop an effective SEO campaign across the Web, and help make the phone ring when the business is found through a Web search.

• Solutions that help local businesses integrate online marketing and advertising campaigns across different outlets. Own a hair salon or a tree service business? If you do, everything is local, and services that help to reach the local market are what you care about. WebVisible,  for instance, buys advertising space from multiple media providers and ad networks, and provides many types of online marketing solutions, including fully managed search advertising, banner/display advertising, call tracking solutions, custom landing pages, promotional URLs and more. Using the WebVisible platform, small businesses can target local advertising more effectively.

• Tools that enable you to manage all of your social networking profiles through one client. HootSuite offers a service today that lets you manage all of your Twitter profiles simultaneously, but I don’t think I’ve seen something would let you do manage across multiple sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

• Services that help integrate more structured digital marketing tools (Web sites, email and search engine optimization and marketing) with more ad hoc social media initiatives. Ideally, this integration could significantly boost the value of both types of activities. I haven’t spotted a  good example of this yet, so let me know if you know of one.

Another Plea for Plain English!

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s Here and Now at lunch time while running a few errands in my car. I tuned into a great story about the “Plain English Campaign”, which was founded in 1979 by now 71-year old Chrissie Maher.  The organization’s mission is to campaign against “gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information.”

Host Robin Young and Ms. Maher shared a lot of interesting statistics on how organizations from the Veteran’s Administration, the Navy, the FAA to General Electric have saved time, money and even lives by rewriting documentation and other materials in clear, simple language instead of a lot of jargon and babble. The two used terminology favored in the financial services industry to illustrate how complicated, contrived, dense language makes financial documents so difficult to understand—and probably contributed to the economic meltdown.

Hmmm…I thought, the technology industry suffers from this too. But my overall impression is that as an industry, we are communicating more clearly than we have in the past. Sadly when I got home, I realized we may have further to go than I thought, as I opened a press release for “New Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com Increases Developer Productivity for Creating Rich Internet Applications in the Cloud” in my inbox. The first paragraph reads as follows:

SAN FRANCISCO – October 26, 2009 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Adobe Systems Incorporated [NYSE: ADBE], today announced the availability of a new offering that unites the power of the Force.com platform with the richness and ubiquity of the Adobe® Flash® Platform to enable a new generation of cloud-based rich Internet applications (RIAs).  The new offering, Adobe® Flash® Builder™ for Force.com, integrates the two platforms to bring the richness of the consumer Web to enterprise cloud applications to enable a significantly improved level of developer productivity.

Whoa—translation, please! I think that the release is saying that these two vendors are teaming up to make it easier for developers to write cooler, more interactive Internet applications. But what was the person (or people) that wrote this thinking–or drinking—when they came up with that? Between “power of the Force”, the cloud, the flashes, the RIAs and the rest of the hot air, they’ve made it unnecessarily complex to sort through. You might even think this was an alliance between different empires in Star Wars, instead of two technology companies.

Believe me, I understand that it very tough to break down complex, technical things into understandable terms. And of course, it can be hard to resist trying to make all this stuff sound (more?) exciting. I’m setting up an RSS link to the Plain English site as another reminder to always at least try to demystify the technology solutions I’m writing about, instead of making them harder to understand.

PDFSalesLeads-A Clever Solution to the Pesky .PDF Problem

In our industry, vendors spend a lot of time and money developing white papers to educate prospects about new technologies. White papers that are well-researched and clearly written can help explain the value of  new or complex solutions to the audiences that can potentially benefit from them.

Of course, vendors also want to generate qualified sales leads from their white papers. But when it comes to tracking and measuring how well they actually perform in terms lead generation, many marketers find themselves in a quandary. After publishing a white paper in an Adobe .pdf file, do you gate access to the paper by requiring people to fill out one of those annoying registration forms (and risk losing the reader), or do you just put the document up without a registration gate, and  leave it to chance that prospects will contact you on their own?

Last week, Vitrium briefed me on it’s new solution, PDFSalesLeads, which I think will give both vendors and Web surfers a happy medium. With PDFSalesLeads, you can embed a registration form anywhere in your .pdf document, so that the reader can take a look at the information first, and   then decide if they want to register and receive more information or be contacted.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solution comes with 8 standard registration questions, you can use as few or as many of these as you like. You can embed the form in 5 steps, which the site guides you through. Pricing is $49/month, for an unlimited number of documents and leads.

One of the things I really like about this solution is that  there is a skip button. So if a reader doesn’t want to fill out the form, they don’t have to. This is great for people like me, who are often doing secondary research–not shopping. And actually, this should save vendors time and money  too when you think about it. I can’t even count the number of sales calls and emails I’ve gotten from downloading .pdfs for things that  I’m really not  a prospect for. So while marketers may get fewer leads, they should be better quality leads.

Another cool thing about the solution is that the embedded registration form stays with the .pdf. So as the .pdf gets circulated around via email, subsequent recipients can register if they want to, giving you the potential to capture these viral leads.

Vitrium is also developing an on-premise, enterprise version for companies that want to run it internally, but they are going to prove it out and work kinks in the SaaS environment. The enterprise version will have features for batch file loads, and system to system integration with CRM systems.  Vitrium will likely also find a market for this with white paper aggregators, such as Ziff-Davis or TechTarget, who can offer the service and manage leads for their clients.

Workingpoint’s New Twist on SaaS Pricing for Small Businesses

In a post earlier this month, I raised the issue that SaaS vendors targeting small businesses need to start experimenting with different pricing options if they want to create a true volume market for their solutions (Prescription for Subscription Fatigue? Time for New SaaS Pricing Models). While per user, per month pricing has become the norm in the SaaS world, monthly fees can add up quickly for small businesses–and at a certain point, individuals and decision makers in small businesses balk at forking out for another subscription.

Last week, Tate Holt, CEO of Workingpoint (http://www.workingpoint.com) gave me a briefing and demo on their solution. In case you’re not familiar with Workingpoint, the company was previously called Netbooks, but they have scrapped that name, along with the old Netbooks product. Workingpoint is built on new code and sports a much cleaner, easier to use UI than it’s predecessor. The solution provides small businesses with a business management solution that includes accounting, contact management, expense tracking, dashboard and reporting–along with some other neat things, such as— a profile page to create a one-page starter Web site to get indexed on the Web.

Workingpoint has come up with a new twist on SaaS pricing that is worth taking a look at. The vendor’s strategy is to offer small businesses “a compelling free product without a time limit with compelling reasons to upgrade”. The first user subscription is free “forever”.

This in itself isn’t that unique; several vendors offer a free seat or two. However, Workingpoint charges one flat fee that covers both additional users and premium services–kind of like a buffet. For $10 per month, you can register as many additional users as you need. So whether you add 1 user, or 5 more, you’re covered with that one, $10 per month charge. —In addition, the flat  $10 per month fee will also give the small business access to use many of Workingpoint’s planned premium features, such as banking integration, Web store integration, and mapping service for Schedule C Level tax reporting.

To make this business model work, Workingpoint needs to convert about 25 percent of its users to the paid model. After formally launching the solution in July, the company has taken it’s first baby steps towards this goal, signing up its first paying customers this month. It will be very interesting to monitor Workingpoint’s progress and see if it can make this alternative pricing model work–both for small businesses, and for itself.

FinancialForce: A New Force in Cloud-based Accounting

Last week, Unit 4 Aggresso, parent company of CODA, announced that it has teamed up with Salesforce.com to launch FinancialForce.com. FinancialForce.com is actually Coda2Go, the cloud based accounting application that CODA built from the ground up on the Force.com platform, and sold through AppExchange. The deal pushes FinancialForce into the spotlight as a poster child for Force.com, and underscores Salesforce’s determination to break down the barriers that have kept companies from running their accounting and financial applications in the cloud.

But how much will this move the needle for cloud-based accounting–which has never been able to gain the kind of market momentum that cloud CRM has enjoyed? There are many reasons for the gap, but mostly because the financials/accounting function is a very different than CRM. In comparison to CRM, accounting solutions usually serve a much smaller, more bounded set of users. CRM users typically span several line of business areas, from sales to marketing to customer service, while accounting users reside primarily in the financials area. CRM users are more likely to be geographically dispersed and mobile, whereas accounting users are usually located in headquarters or major branch or divisional locations. In addition, those financial types have a reputation for being pretty set in their ways.

And, let’s face it, it’s not like cloud-based financial solutions are anything new. NetSuite (which launched as NetLedger in 1998) has actually been around a year or so longer than Salesforce. Intacct, Intuit QuickBooks Online, and several lesser-known companies including Workingpoint, Clarity, Less Accounting, Freshbooks and others offer cloud-based financials aimed at small and midsized businesses.  These players have made some headway—especially in the SOHO space—but the vast majority of companies still choose to deploy traditional, on premise accounting solutions. In comparison, close to half of all new CRM deployments are cloud-based.

However, with the formation of FinancialForce, Salesforce is now bringing its considerable marketing clout and savvy into the ring. While Salesforce.com’s stake in FinancialForce is undisclosed, my call with Jeremy Roche, Coda2Go CEO, who will continue in the helm at Financial Force, leads me to conclude that the investment and alliance is considerable:

• FinancialForce has opened a new headquarters location in Salesforce.com’s incubator building, supplementing existing offices in Manchester New Hampshire and Harrogate, England.
• FinancialForce is earmarking a good chunk of the Salesforce investment to aggressively ramp up its sales personnel and initiatives.
• The two companies are using Salesforce.com’s service cloud to link their support systems, and Salesforce will provide front line support for FinancialForce.com customers. This will enable  FinancialForce to scale quickly to support all the new customers that they expect to gain from the expanded sales team and the fresh cache of the Salesforce association.

I believe that financials and accounting will never be as obvious a choice for cloud computing as CRM, collaboration and other applications that need to serve a bigger, more diverse and more mobile set of users. However, this new venture will bring cloud-based financials into more frequent and serious consideration for more customers—especially as Gen Y/Millenial workers replace retiring baby boomers and Gen-Xers. Salesforce has more marketing DNA than any other B2B company that I can think of, and a large, growing user base that it can prime for FinancialForce. It can appeal to CEOs with a message of tight integration between the two solutions on Force.com and in the Service Cloud, and reassure CFOs with CODA’s 30 year of financials experience.

In fact, as it’s done in the CRM arena, Salesforce will create a rising tide that will lift the boats of other cloud-based financials vendors as well.  After all, FinancialForce won’t be the best fit for every company, but Salesforce will do what it does best—and get more people interested in considering the cloud-based option. As the tide rises, vendors of traditional, customer premise financial software—particularly in the small and medium business markets—will face more pressure to rethink re-think their cloud strategies—or lack of them.

What are Managed Services, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published in Small Business Computing, September 25, 2009)

Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to the confusion by over-complicating things. To help add a sense of clarity to the confusion, each month, Laurie McCabe, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates (a business consulting firm), will pick a technology term, explain what it means in plain English, and then discuss why it may be important to you. This month, Laurie takes a look at managed services.

What are Managed Services?

Managed services let you offload specific IT operations to a service provider, known in tech parlance as a Managed Services Provider. The managed service provider assumes ongoing responsibility for monitoring, managing and/or problem resolution for selected IT systems and functions on your behalf.

Managed services providers can offer services such as alerts, security, patch management, data backup and recovery for different client devices: desktops, notebooks, servers, storage systems, networks and applications. Offloading routine infrastructure management to an experienced managed services professional lets you concentrate on running your business, with fewer interruptions due to IT issues.

Managed services providers usually price their services on a subscription basis. Depending on the services they provide, pricing is usually based on the number of devices, with different packages priced at different levels. Some provide customer support onsite when required. Basic services often start with a monitoring service, which notifies you of problems, which you resolve on your own. At the upper end of the spectrum, service providers offer fully managed services that cover everything from alerts through problem resolution.

Typically they perform an initial assessment of your current IT environment and management requirements to help you decide what services and service levels you need.

Why Should You Care?

Just like larger companies, small businesses need technology to operate efficiently and to compete effectively. But as reliance on IT grows, the resources to support an increasingly complex IT environment may not. In many small businesses, IT resources are scarce, and can be quickly overwhelmed with the day-to-day responsibilities of keeping the IT infrastructure that the business depends on up and running.

If you fall behind in keeping up with things such as backups, patches and security, the odds are that you’ll face an IT outage or another problem down the road that will negatively impact your business. For instance, if your e-mail server, customer relationship management system, financial application or network goes down unexpectedly, you face substantial productivity and revenue losses as a result.

MSPs act as an extension of your IT department, taking care of routine IT infrastructure monitoring and management around the clock—freeing up your IT staff to focus on higher-value projects. By proactively monitoring and maintaining your systems, an MSP can help you avoid many technology problems in the first place. Should an issue occur, an experienced MSP can troubleshoot and resolve it more efficiently.

Unlike traditional outsourcing situations, where you surrender complete control of your IT assets, you decide what you want the service provider to take care of, and what you want to handle. You retain full visibility into the process and management of your systems. In addition, the MSP subscription model gives you more expense predictability than a consultant-type time and billing model.

What to Consider

MSPs offer a wide range of different services. Many focus on managing specific areas and functions, such as storage and related management services, or desktop management and help desk services. Some provide management services for server hardware, operating systems and middleware, but limited support for applications such as e-mail. Many provide onsite services as required, but may have limited regional or local coverage areas.

If you are looking for more comprehensive services, including alerts, monitoring and management services for a wide range of client, network, servers and applications, Dell offers ProManage-Managed Services for SMBs. The service offers small businesses a choice of service levels, priced on a per-device, per-month basis. Most services are provided remotely, but Dell and its channel partners supply onsite service when required.

With so many different types of MSPs and offerings, the MSP label can be a confusing one. So, when considering managed services, think first about your requirements. How satisfied you are with the level and quality of support that you have today? Where are the gaps, pain points and inefficiencies in IT infrastructure management? How do downtime, outages and other problems impact your business?

With these requirements top of mind, evaluate MSPs that map to your IT, business and budget requirements and provide a flexible, proactive approach that can adapt with you as your needs evolve.

Prescription for Subscription Fatigue? Time for New SaaS Pricing Models

As an analyst that’s covered the software-as-service (SaaS) market since 1999, I am briefed by vendors introducing new subscription services into the market on a regular basis. Many of these solutions provide small businesses with real solutions to real problems—whether helping you market your business, keep your books, manage projects or pay your bills (just to mention few). In many ways, SaaS or “cloud” pay-as-you-go subscription pricing model is ideal for small businesses. It eliminates the barrier of big upfront capital investments, and reduces financing requirements, freeing up capital for other needs. The SaaS provider takes on the burden of IT support and maintenance, enabling the small business to focus more resources and attention on the business.

And there’s no doubt that the SaaS model provides tremendous economies–which vendors can pass on to customers. Multi-tenant architecture enables vendors to service customers much more efficiently, and Web-centered marketing makes it much more affordable for companies to effectively reach prospective customers with their offerings. All else being equal, its highly likely that a SaaS solution will be easier for a small business to digest—both financially and technically—than a packaged software offering.

But, I have to wonder, how will subscription fatigue affect adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud computing solutions in the small business market? While the threshold for purchasing an individual solution may be quite reasonable, when you start adding more services, how many of these monthly subscription fees can the average small business afford? And how many different service provider contracts does a small business want to manage and monitor?

From a consumer standpoint, just stop and tally up what you spend every month on mobile and land lines, cable TV, Internet connectivity, and other services from Netflix to satellite radio to online gaming–not to mention traditional media subscriptions. For a family, it can quickly creep up to enough to feed a family of six in a third world country.

In the SaaS world, these monthly fees can add up even more quickly for a small business, who may be purchasing a service for $10, $25, or $60 per user per month, for several users. At a certain point, individuals and decision makers in small businesses balk at forking out for another subscription. Unless the service just whacks you over the side of the head with its value, many businesses will decide to just continue to do without. As they tally up monthly fees, they may also determine that some services haven’t really provided enough value—and are, in fact, dispensable.

All of which points to the fact that, for the most part, the small business SaaS per user, per month pricing model hasn’t changed in the past 10 years! Oh sure, there are ad supported free services, and a few vendors, such as Zoho, that give companies a couple of free seats before fees kick in. But for the most part, the per user, per month model reigns, no matter how much or how little individual users actually use the solution, or the value that they get out of it.

SaaS vendors targeting small businesses need to start experimenting with some different options if they want to create a true volume market for their solutions. How about trying pricing models that would allow for concurrent use, instead of specific named users?  Or unlimited use for businesses of different sizes? Or (and I’m sure that this will send shudders down some vendors’ spines) pricing based in part on measuring the effectiveness of the solution, in terms of time or cost savings, or increased web site traffic, or some other relevant variable? SaaS has been a huge leap forward in how software is delivered, it’s time for vendors to experiment with the next big leap—new pricing models.

What is a Thin Client, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published in Small Business Computing, August 27, 2009)

Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to the confusion by over-complicating things. To help add a sense of clarity to the confusion, each month, Laurie McCabe, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates (a business consulting firm), will pick a technology term, explain what it means in plain English, and then discuss why it may be important to you. This month, Laurie takes a look at thin clients.

What Is a Thin Client?

A thin client is a computing device that’s connected to a network. Unlike a typical PC or “fat client,” that has the memory, storage and computing power to run applications and perform computing tasks on its own, a thin client functions as a virtual desktop, using the computing power residing on networked servers.

They typically have just enough processing power, information and parts to access and use the computing resources of a server. The thin client can’t run applications or store data or documents on its own; it functions as an interface to convey your keystrokes and connect to the applications, documents, data and storage on networked servers, where the actual work is done.

Most thin clients run Web browsers and/or remote desktop software, such as Microsoft Terminal Services or Citrix XenApp, so you see the familiar browser or desktop environment that you’re used to.

With thin clients, you run the desktop environment on the server, and remotely display the desktop screens on the thin clients. You need to manage this on the server side with what’s called a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) — software that creates the desktop images, stores them on servers and sends them over the network to the thin clients. Both desktop and mobile thin clients are available from a wide range of manufacturers. Some such as Wyse, specialize in thin clients, while others, such as Dell and HP provide thin clients as part of a larger client device portfolio.

Why Should You Care?

Because they lack hard drives, CD-ROM drives, fans and other moving parts, thin clients are smaller, cheaper and simpler for manufacturers to build than traditional PCs or notebooks—and cheaper for you to buy.

Thin clients decrease client maintenance costs and hassles. With fewer moving parts, and very little software running on the device, fewer things can go wrong with a thin client, so they’re easier to maintain and fix. If a thin client does fail, you can easily swap in a replacement without losing productivity because employees don’t store any data on their client device.

Since everything is managed, stored and secured centrally, from the data center, thin clients eliminate the issues of installing, updating and patching applications, backing up files, or scanning for viruses on individual computers. Because employees see and have access only to what they need to do their job, thin clients are easier for non-technical people to use.

Centralized management also provides security benefits. You’re not storing any data or information on the thin client, so you don’t need to worry about exposing confidential data if a thin client gets lost or stolen. In industries such as healthcare, where adherence to privacy regulations is of paramount importance, thin clients can give medical personnel access to patient records without concerns about confidential information being downloaded. Thin clients also use less energy than standard desktops and notebooks.

Because they run cooler, they can help reduce air conditioning requirements as well.

What to Consider

Companies have traditionally turned to thin clients to give employees access to certain applications and functions, such as in a call center or retail setting via remote desktop software. Thin clients are also a good fit for remote offices, where it can be difficult and time consuming to get PCs fixed. However, as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, the use of thin clients has the potential to expand significantly, as they can also provide a gateway to an almost limitless number of Web-based applications.

However, thin clients aren’t right for all situations. Thin clients must be connected to the network at all times. Performance for graphically intensive applications can be slow, since people access them over the network instead of on their own device. People may also balk at giving up desktop applications and control over their workspace. And, companies need to also factor backend infrastructure and remote desktop licensing costs into the equation to determine whether thin clients are the right fit for their needs.

What is Unified Communications, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published in Small Business Computing, July 27, 2009)

Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to the confusion by over-complicating things. To help add a sense of clarity to the confusion, each month, Laurie McCabe, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates (a business consulting firm), will pick a technology term, explain what it means in plain English, and then discuss why it may be important to you. This month Laurie looks at Unified Communications.

What is Unified Communications?

Most of us use several different tools and devices to communicate. At a minimum, you probably use a cell phone, a landline phone, fax and e-mail. Many of us also other tools as well, such as instant messaging, texting and Web conferencing.  Unified communications (UC) solutions incorporate these different modes of communications into one system.

Unified communication solutions take advantage of new technologies to integrate and streamline messages from many sources. For instance, a unified messaging system lets you access multiple phone lines, e-mail, fax and instant messaging from one place. These solutions break down communications barriers so that it’s easier and faster for you to find, reach and communicate with other people, and vice versa

It’s important to remember that UC isn’t one tool, but a solution that pulls together all of the communication and collaboration tools that you’re already using (plus some new ones you may want to add) so you can communicate through a consistent interface and experience. For instance, with a UC solution, you give your customers just your office phone number, and calls to that number will also ring simultaneously on your cell phone.

UC solutions can integrate both non-real-time communications tools, such as traditional phone lines, e-mail, fax and voice-mail, with real-time communications tools such as instant messaging (IM) and Web conferencing. They can also incorporate many other communication tools, too, such as and voice over IP (VoIP) telephony solutions, text messaging, screen sharing and video conferencing—just to name a few. Many use presence awareness technology that locates where people to see if they’re available, (think IM buddy list).

Why Should You Care?

Whether you’re a sales person, a construction worker or an attorney, you’re likely to be on the go, or working from different locations throughout the week. UC solutions can help you get more done more quickly. They help you and stay connected to your co-workers and customers, whether you’re on the road, in the office or working from home.

Depending on where you are and what the situation requires, your preference for the device you use (cell phone, PDA, notebook desktop computer, fax machine) is likely to change, as is the mode of communicating (traditional phone service, IP telephony, cell phone, text message, IM, etc.).  Everyone else is in the same boat. So, while it’s nice to have all these handy tools, it’s a chore to remember different numbers, and to constantly check different services for messages.

UC can help you be more productive and save you time by letting you move seamlessly from one device and mode of communication to another. For example, using a UC solution, you could:

    * Have your calls follow you. For instance, say you dial into a conference call from your home phone at 6:00 a.m. When you walk out the door, the call transfers automatically to your cell phone—without interruption. When you get to the office, the call transfers to your office phone, which has the capability to also initiate a Web conference.

    * Find people you need more quickly. Let’s say you and your sales manager both have busy schedules. You will both be in and out of the office in between sales calls. You’re in the last throes of negotiating a deal, and you need to get his buy-in on a discount—but you have no idea where he is.  A UC solutions tracks down your boss for you. It knows the phone number where your boss is located, and automatically forward the call to the phone line he can access.

UC can also help you operate more flexibly and save money.  Say, for instance, you hire five more employees; the solution will easily accommodate remote workers. With a UC solution that includes IP telephony, it’s easy and fast to add new phone lines for new workers, wherever they’re located. Instead of having to move to a bigger office and pay higher rent, the new employees can work from home with just an Internet connection.

What to Consider

UC can be a confusing area to evaluate because different vendors design and build their solutions with different assortments of communications and collaboration tools. If you’re considering UC, start by putting together a list of communication pain points and problems that your company faces. Depending on the nature of your business, its size, and how people work, you may want very different capabilities than the business next door. You’ll also want to look for a solution that is flexible enough to let you add new capabilities as you need them.

The other area you’ll want to consider is how you want to deploy the solution. Companies such as Avaya, Cisco and many others sell UC solutions — designed specifically for small businesses — that package up systems, software and phones. IBM just announced that it will add a real-time communication version to its Lotus Foundations line, which is designed for small businesses that want one appliance to support communications and collaboration. Finally, vendors such as PanTerra provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) UC solutions through its partner channel. 

What’s a Business App Appliance, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published June 18, 2009 in Small Business Computing)

Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to the confusion by over-complicating things. To help add a sense of clarity to the confusion, each month, Laurie McCabe, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates (a business consulting firm), will pick a technology term, explain what it means in plain English, and then discuss why it may be important to you. This month Laurie looks at Business Application Appliances.

What’s a Business App Appliance, and Why Should You Care?

As with other types of computing appliances, business-application appliances are “purpose-built” to address a specific type of computing requirement. Akin to a household appliance, the aim is to plug them in and use them, without spending a lot of time getting them up and running or taking care of them. Business application server appliances come pre-configured with all of the hardware and software components required to run a specific business application, such as accounting or CRM packaged together in one box.

Most vendors build their appliances with industry standard hardware and operating systems, such as Linux or Microsoft Windows, and they integrate databases, security, storage, virtualization and other technologies as necessary to provide a complete solution. As a result, users can set up an appliance in a matter of minutes, instead of the hours or days it would normally take to source, install, integrate and tune all of these component parts on a general purpose server.

As important, the appliance vendor (or a business partner) provides remote system management, monitoring, updates, patches, support and backup over the Internet. However, in contrast to earlier appliances, which were often limited to one solution, and one-size-fits-all, today’s business application appliances often feature open APIs, and use virtualization and other technologies to make them more flexible and scalable. This lets you add more users, tailor the solution, and add more applications to the appliance.

Some examples of new business application appliances designed for small and medium businesses include:

• IBM-Intuit Smart Cube appliance, which features Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise accounting software, and is designed for companies with up to 250 employees. It can scale from five to 30 people, and users can integrate optional collaboration and database and solutions. This solution is one of many available in IBM’s Smart Market appliance community. 

•  Sage’s Applianz solutions, which offer Sage MAS 90, 200, 500 and Sage SalesLogix as business application appliances. These solutions feature CompleteAssurance, which combines Applianz remote access, hardware maintenance and automated nightly backup service into one product. 

• IBM Lotus Foundations Start, which bundles Lotus Notes/Domino collaboration solutions and Lotus Symphony and integrated backup into a plug-and-play appliance. Optionally, customers can also run Microsoft Windows and Windows-based solutions on the appliance using integrated virtual machine technology. 

Why Should You Care?

Business application appliances are analogous to consumer computing appliances, such as an iPod, Xbox or TiVo. The basic concept is the same; the vendor automates and integrates all of the necessary solution components into one simple-to-use system. This ensures that everything works together out-of-the-box, with little or no IT support. Appliances can also provide peace of mind for businesses with limited or no IT staff, as vendors and/or their business partners provide day-to-day systems support, maintenance and backups over the Web. Many take advantage of terminal services, so you can connect remote workers easily, and don’t need to worry about upgrading PCs.

Because appliances are purpose-built, they make more efficient use of technology and can minimize both acquisition and ongoing support costs. The appliance approach crosses the chasm between traditional, customer-premise deployments and cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, integrating on-premise, integrated appliance systems with cloud services. In some respects, this hybrid model provides the best of both worlds for companies that want something easy to use and maintain, but are still uncomfortable with putting their data and processing power in the cloud.

What to Consider

Business application appliances can provide a more affordable, efficient means to deploy and use business solutions than traditional customer premise solutions. But, as with any type of business software selection, you’ll want to read the fine print. What’s included in the purchase price of the business application appliance? For instance, what maintenance is included in the initial purchase price, and how much are ongoing maintenance fees? Does the vendor automatically backup the system, and if so, how frequently? How easy—or difficult—is it to add new users?

You’ll also want to evaluate flexibility. While it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to customize the solution at the source code level, it should let you tailor things such as templates and reports to your requirements. Also, consider whether you need to integrate the business application appliance with other applications that you’re currently running, or may need to add in the future, and how the vendor can help you to do this. Finally, what happens if your appliance breaks? How does the vendor provide service, and what is the replacement policy? The appliance vendor should be able to provide a roll back to a pre-failure image and quickly restore operation on a new appliance if necessary.

Companies looking for simplicity, ease-of-use and reduced cost will also want to evaluate the trade-offs between appliances and the SaaS model. For instance, you purchase and own an appliance. In a SaaS model, you pay for a monthly or annual subscription service, which lowers upfront costs and financial risks, making it easier to switch to another solution if you’re not satisfied.

Over time, as technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing mature, I expect more and more blurring between cloud computing and business application appliances—just like we see in the consumer space. Sooner rather than later, business application appliances should also be available in a subscription service, where you may purchase the box for a nominal fee, and subscribe to an application service that runs on the box. Until then, do your research, weigh the trade-offs and select the option that best fits your needs.

Did this help you understand business application appliances? Let me know, and send me any additional questions you have on the topic. Also, please send your suggestions for other technology terms and areas that you’d like explained in upcoming columns.