SMB COVERAGE FROM AROUND THE WEB
What do small and medium-sized businesses want? Today MrMail.com announced an SMB opinion poll to answer this question in order to further enhance service provision. Cloud hosting and mobile communications are two of the driving factors behind the rapid pace of today's business operations. However, providing the rapid response to the demands of a local or global market with multiple paths of access to a company has proven to be a major stumbling block for many SMBs. Very often these businesses are structured with individuals in different geographical locations, making instantaneous communication and synchronization vital. MrMail.com began offering the ZeXtras service in conjunction with their VMWare Zimbra product line to small and medium sized businesses in early 2012 with outstanding results and has launched the opinion survey to ensure the success of the New Vision Initiative launch in 2013. The clients who are utilizing this service enjoy the rock-solid stability of a server-hosted premium quality application that works with their mobile device flawlessly. Gone are the days of sole reliance on email alone, now with the power of mobile synchronization every member of a business network is in touch and in tune with the status of the business. Companies can now integrate their Intranet and Internet web space through collaboration and social media applications as well. The goal of the opinion poll to determine the support services small and medium sized businesses need most to fully leverage the power of their cloud hosting package.
Anytime an MSP can help an SMB client level the playing field to compete more evenly with larger rivals, it is a major selling point for their services. As detailed in a recent white paper from Intuit, “The New Data Democracy,” managed solutions and services that allow SMBs to collect, sift and analyze Big Data are becoming a huge client draw.One way Big Data can help SMBs compete with or even outdo larger organizations is by allowing them to engage in highly personalized customer interactions and transactions – and even B2B enterprises still serve some sort of end “customer.” In addition to allowing deeper mining of multichannel behavior customers exhibit while interacting with SMBs, Big Data can also allow SMBs to track multichannel customer behavior in publicly available forums such as social media, chat rooms, blogs, etc.And beyond offering highly tailored experiences to individual customers, Big Data analytics also enables SMBs to improve their overall customer experience by performing “social listening” – or collecting unstructured commentary from social media forums and pulling out specific comments and conversations that directly affect the SMB. In this way SMBs can quickly detect any widespread problems or issues customers are having and resolve them.
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A study commissioned by Cbeyond, a telecommunications and IT company based in Atlanta, Georgia, revealed that cloud adoption among SMBs is growing. In addition, SMBs are increasing their IT budgets in order to migrate to the cloud. According to the study, 64 percent of the small businesses that were surveyed have plans to increase their IT budgets to accommodate cloud services adoption. Companies would also be hard-pressed to include infrastructure without the cloud, a move that represents a growing opportunity for business partners to reach out to their smallest customers with an updated managed cloud services portfolio. Finding customers may not be difficult, but maintaining a profitable and competitive edge along these newfound markets can be challenging. And as for service prospects in 2013, accounting, banking, company emailing, data archiving, and file sharing are the most popular choices.The factors that drive cloud services adoption among SMBs are the following: 83 percent claimed that cloud services offered them more flexibility, 78 percent said that cloud-based services allowed them to be more productive, and 71 percent maintained that migrating to the cloud was a money-saving move.Forty-nine percent of surveyed SMBs expected their general business conditions to improve six months from now, while 45 percent said that they predict their 2013 hiring goals to fall short of their hiring levels in 2012. Plus, while majority of SMBs planned to ramp up their IT spending, 31 percent admitted to keeping theirs unchanged and five percent would lower their IT budget.
j2 Global Announces Trends That Will Impact SMBs in 2013: Smarter Deployment of Mobile and Cloud Technologies Will Drive Greater Efficiency and Productivity
j2 Global Announces Trends That Will Impact SMBs in 2013: Smarter Deployment of Mobile and Cloud Technologies Will Drive Greater Efficiency and ProductivityLOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwire - Dec 19, 2012) - j2 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM), cloud services provider for small businesses, including leading brands eVoice, eFax and Campaigner, today announced key trends and predictions that will impact small-to medium-sized businesses in the coming year. Mobility, expansion of the cloud, and integration of business services are the three key trends that SMBs must be ready for in 2013. See an infographic showing the three key trends here.In 2011 we reached a new milestone with the number of smartphones sold exceeding the number of PCs sold. In a recent press release summarizing its 2011 country-level estimates, Canalys estimated that vendors shipped nearly 488 million smart phones to clients in 2011, compared to an estimated 414.6 million PCs.1 This trend suggests a continuing mass mobilization of the global workforce. Smartphones and tablets become ubiquitous. In 2013, companies will get smarter about how they use mobile devices. These tools are becoming ubiquitous, spanning industries, generations and job types. Smartphones and tablets will be leveraged more heavily as businesses move beyond using them just for simple communications. Business systems, such as CRM, will go mobile enabling teams to input and access sales information on-the-go, driving higher levels of communication and productivity. Collaboration tools that were previously office-bound -- like conference calling and web conferencing -- will be liberated to facilitate faster and more strategic responses to real-time business needs.
Facebook is ramping up its focus on small and medium-sized businesses and revealed that more than 300,000 business-owned pages have promoted more than 2.5m posts since June. Facebooks director of small business Dan Levy also said that into the future more small firms will have a branded Facebook page in advance of building a website.
Ex-PayPal executive Levy was in Dublin yesterday at Facebook’s international headquarters, where the company now employs 450 people. The company said the Facebook economy – the ecosystem of apps, advertising and services – contributed €397.2m to the European economy out of which €165.7m went directly into the Irish economy.Based in Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters in Silicon Valley, Levy heads up an area of expanding interest to Facebook – enabling ordinary and small businesses across the world to use the 1bn-strong social network to sell goods and services.The social network supports 4,500 jobs in Europe, 800 of which are the result of small businesses using Facebook as a platform for growth. In Ireland, Facebook supports 2,200 jobs, out of which 450 people are employed directly by the company.Levy explained that the number of local business pages advertising on Facebook has nearly doubled since January and that active local pages have increased 40pc since January. More than a quarter of the businesses are new advertisers on the social network.
Social gifting apps let users send physical items or gift cards via Facebook or email, combining social media marketing and e-commerce. While some types of gifting platforms are meant to be used by big retailers and national brands, a number of new services have popped up that local merchants can use to fuel in-store transactions and increase their online presence. Here are five social gifting platforms perfectly tailored for SMBs.1. Plumfare Plumfare is a social gifting app focused on food and photography. It allows users to take a photo of an experience they’re enjoying — devouring a delicious slice of pizza, say — and send that photo to a friend. Through Plumfare, the photo then can be converted into a gift. Any business can have its offers integrated with Plumfare for free; the app charges users and sends the profits directly to the business. The app allows for promotion of local restaurants and their items (through photos) and creates a direct connection to customers via the gifts.2. Treater Treater is powered through Facebook, enabling users to send “treats” to their Facebook friends. The app lets merchants offer specific items, not just coupons, and the transactions resemble those of credit cards. Users redeem “treats” at local spots. This app helps connect merchants to their online social followers and allows for online transactions that translate into offline customers.
The potential benefits to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) of cloud networking, whereby applications/data is accessible on the Internet instead of on a single computer or private network, are well recorded. SMB spending on cloud services is expected to increase by almost 20 percent annually over the next five years.Common examples of cloud-based solutions that SMBs are using include hosted email and storage, online payment processing and accounts software. Many traditional services are also ‘moving to the cloud’ to become more cost-effective and efficient. For example, while fax may seem outdated as a method of business communication, very often there is a legal requirement for businesses to be able to send and receive faxes even though fax machines may be costly both in terms of outlay and ongoing maintenance.Hosted fax solutions offer a cost-effective alternative, allowing businesses to send and receive faxes securely over the Internet and are just one example of how cloud services have the power to revolutionise legacy business practices for SMBs.However, with more and more companies moving to the cloud for everything from the basics, network connectivity has never been more important. Services delivered through the Cloud are only as reliable as the network that they are delivered on – if the connection to the Internet breaks so does the ability to access important applications and data which may be fundamental for day to day operations.
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VMware users at small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise IT shops saw plenty of changes
in 2012, from the bumpy rise of vSphere
single sign-on to a cloud computing push. And 2013 is sure to usher in more changes -- namely,
SMB virtualization. Here are the virtualization trends experts at SearchVMware expect to see over
the course of 2013.VMware will likely release vCloud Suite 6 around July, including vSphere and vCloud Director 6.
While physical-to-virtual
(P2V) consolidation -- with VMware as the primary hypervisor -- will continue in 2013, we will not
see any huge jump to cloud computing. VMware vCloud
Director is still a complex proposition for most companies. Adoption
of vCloud Director will ramp up slightly, but without a big spike.Users always have an eye out for hypervisor choices that are simple to implement, cost-effective
and easy to manage. Because of this, more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are just
beginning to virtualize will adopt Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. There won't be huge
numbers of users jumping from vSphere to Hyper-V, however.Large enterprises with VMware enterprise license agreements will be interested in hypervisor
tiering, which would reduce their VMware license costs by using multiple hypervisors.
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