Tag Archives: NetSuite Inc.

About 1452 days ago Business Software

Traditional CRM vs. Social CRM

Connecting with potential customers is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses today.  A recent study by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland shows that marketing/innovation is the single biggest competitive disadvantage confronting small business, after access to capital.  In fact, converting marketing leads into buyers and finding efficient ways to promote and advertise, are two areas small businesses say they struggle the most with.  This finding is supported by a recent Microsoft small business study, which found customer acquisition and retention to be the biggest challenges facing their small business partners. To help overcome customer acquisition challenges, many small businesses are looking into customer relationship management (CRM) tools and strategies.   In the past, many viewed CRM as being too complex and expensive to implement for the expected return on investment.  But over the last couple of years, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and a host of others have allowed companies of all sizes to implement CRM products and services at a fraction of the cost, time and effort needed in the past. Traditionally, CRM’s strong suit has been improved operational effectiveness, easier access to information, and improved interdepartmental collaboration.  While these are critically important to the success of any business, the focal point of these areas are internal to the company.  And while a more efficient company should have a positive impact on customer interaction and responsiveness, does it really help us to meaningfully connect with those potential customers empowered in a Web 2.0 world? Social media adds this missing dimension to the traditional, operational areas of CRM.  And according to a recent Nielsen Company study, two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visited a social networking site or blogging site — what they refer to as “member communities.” The integration of social media into CR strategy — called Social CRM — differs in focus from traditional customer relationship management in a few key ways. Data-driven vs. content-driven Businesses began investing in CRM applications in the ‘90s mainly to store contact data.  Before contact management software was available, businesses had to store their valuable customer information in Rolodexes, spreadsheets, and even filing cabinets.  It was important to have a central location to store the data that was also easily accessible to communicate effectively with contacts.  And with multiple people “touching” the customer for various reasons, it quickly became important to be able to track activities, appointments, potential deals, notes, and other information.  Consequently, traditional CRM grew out of this need to store, track, and report on critical information about customers and prospects. Social CRM is growing out of a completely different need — the need to attract the attention of those using the Internet to find answers to business challenges they are trying to overcome.  And nothing captivates the attention of searchers like relevant, compelling content.  Having the right content, and enough of it, will help connect you with those needing your product or service.  Creating content in formats that make it easy for your target audience to consume it increases the probability that you will move them to action — starting a conversation with you.  Whether it be by developing a blog post, podcast, YouTube video, or Webinar, creating attractive content is a key pillar of social CRM strategy. Process-centric vs. conversation-centric Traditional customer relationship management is heavily focused on implementing and automating processes.  Companies looking to implement processes like lead and activity management would turn to CRM.  Management would turn to CRM to standardize on sales processes to increase the accuracy of sales forecasts.  And customer service requests could be tracked, routed, escalated, and resolved in a uniform fashion to ensure proper handling.  Traditional CRM helped make it possible to ensure the proper activities and tasks would be performed by the appropriate people, in the correct sequences. While there are processes involved in building a successful social CRM strategy, conversations are at the heart of it.  Having meaningful conversations with those searching for the help you can provide is the turning point in transforming clicks into customers.  The processes involved are aimed at making it easy for people to find us (through our content) and invite us into a conversation — on their terms.  This may take the form of a comment left on a blog post, following your company on Twitter, or possibly embedding your PowerPoint presentation on their webpage.  There are numerous ways to participate in meaningful conversations with people looking for help in solving challenges.  Formalizing a strategy to increase the likelihood of engaging in these conversations is a tenant of social CRM. Operationally-focused vs. people/community-focused As mentioned above, managing customer information is a major concern to businesses of all sizes.  It plays a key role in the ability of businesses to respond to customer requests, manage resources needed to close deals efficiently, and provide management with reports to keep track of sales performance.  This helps executives achieve operational effectiveness, and is particularly important for businesses expanding their sales and marketing operations, needing to implement new processes to manage growth.  Businesses have typically turned to CRM to improve communication between sales and marketing operations, as well as to improve data-access to positively impact decision making.  Whereas traditional CRM activity focused heavily on operational effectiveness and its impact — both internally and on the customer — social CRM is all about people and community.  It’s about how your company intends to participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the industry.  How you embrace non-traditional influential people like popular industry bloggers, and social sites on the Web frequented by your audience.  And fully understanding the importance of contributing to discussions, in a transparent manner, will help you build the kind of reputation needed to become a valued member of the online communities important to your business. So if you’re turning to CRM to help bring on new customers, you’ll have to go beyond traditional CRM focuses by integrating social media infused tactics and strategies.  But it’s important to remember social CRM is not a substitute, but a much needed complement to traditional areas of customer relationship management.  It gets us close to what we’ve needed all along. Brent Leary is a small-business technology analyst, adviser, and award-winning blogger. He is the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business. His blog can be found at http://brentleary.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/brentleary.

About 1513 days ago Business Accounting Software

Online Accounting: Numbers in the Cloud

Financial management is the delicate balancing act that transforms marketing success, operational results, and managerial savvy into a viable, durable business. In order for a small business to be efficient and effective in managing its finances, computerized accounting and digital financial services tools must become part of its daily kit. While such tools are traditionally desktop-based software programs, a new breed of online financial management applications has emerged in the last few years, taking advantage of the growing confidence that businesses are developing in the Web as a safe business environment. Now that entrepreneurs are indeed becoming comfortable with the “software in the cloud” model and the inherent benefits it offers, they are in growing numbers starting to look beyond e-mail or office productivity to more sophisticated and sensitive applications like financials. Web-based financial management applications are not new — think online brokerage and banking. But fully featured online packages are just now fully blooming, not only rivaling in functionality their desktop-based counterparts, but also extending their usefulness through value-added online services such as bill payments, electronic checks issuance, digital invoicing, or customer credit verification. Moreover their collaborative features, such as multi-user access and accountant view make it a natural fit for the “on the go” lifestyle of most modern small business managers. Accounting online The heavyweight of small business accounting, Intuit, has launched an online alternative to its Quickbooks software that can be finally considered a valid option. While its previous attempts were not very successful, the current version of Quickbooks Online, priced from free to $34.95/month, is a quality product that, while not as powerful as the desktop version, does a pretty good job. Peachtree, a longtime small business favorite, also has debuted a well featured online version starting at $150/year and representing a very viable alternative. Notable new online-only accounting packages for small businesses include Clarity Accounting and Less Accounting which is nicely integrated via mashups with Web favorites such as Basecamp, Shopify, and PayPal. Almost ready to re-launch is NetBooks, a product with a bit of a troubled history, but with a very interesting and complete set of features and now in final Beta release. Accounts can now be opened and used for free. A truly superb product, designed for mature small businesses is Intacct. Created from the ground up as a Web-based application, it provides very sophisticated accounting features and it natively integrates with a number of other Web-based software offerings such as Salesforce.com. For even more mature and large organizations, requiring not just accounting but a comprehensive online suite of business management applications, NetSuite is the leader in the space. Online bill payment If you think for a moment about what it is truly involved in paying your business bills using the traditional checkbook and snail mail, it is not difficult to imagine that there must be a better way to do it. Well, there is, and it is called “online bill payment.” While banks have offered similar services for quite a while as part of their online banking offerings, there are independent services that go well beyond the electronic check, and make the process of receiving, screening, tracking, and paying bills extremely efficient. Both Paytrust — owned by Intuit — and CheckFree can receive bills on your behalf, scan them, make them available to you in digital format via a secure Web interface, and allow you to pay them with a click of the mouse, issuing an electronic check or an EFT order.  This approach can be adopted for all vendors and all invoices, and cuts the average time needed to process a bill by more than 50 percent — in my experience — and greatly simplifies the record keeping aspect, eliminating paperwork. Online invoicing When it comes to get paid, or at least to efficiently issue and send invoices, there are a plethora of Web services available. The most notable is Freshbooks, a pioneer of the Web 2.0 era, which allows for efficient time tracking, billing, quoting, and more.  Intuit has its own offering tightly integrated with Quickbooks online called Billing Manager, while Zoho Invoices comes as part of the Zoho online productivity suite. A roster of other minor offerings fill various professional niches and differentiate on price and unique features, including: Free Agent, Simply Invoices, Invoice Place and Billing Orchard. The Web is opening the doors to scores of new software developers every day, reducing the costs to develop new products and services, creating competitive opportunities for better, less expensive products. Online financial software is just now entering the realm of full acceptance among small businesses. Expect an explosion of new, more tailored applications from large players such as Google and Microsoft as well as upstart companies. New products will surface on the horizon in the next couple of years offering true integration with banking, invoicing, billing, and all the other financial services that small businesses use every day, together with more robust ways to analyze performance, giving way to a new generation of well managed and more robust small enterprises. Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.

About 1756 days ago Business Software

Drive Business with a Software Dashboard

A business dashboard has been defined by some experts as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” Business dashboards usually consist of a screen showing you tables and/or graphs pointing out key indicators about your business. You can check your dashboard several times a day, once a day, once a week — however frequently you need to manage your business. Dashboards can be as big-picture or as detailed as you need — ranging from showing you the financial health of the business as a whole, all the way down to detailed slices of an individual activity or department. In this article I’d like to share four low-cost dashboards available for small businesses, some of which you may already be using (even if you don’t realize it): Accounting software dashboards One of the beauties of accounting software today is that most packages come equipped with the ability to run reports.  Increasingly they come with built-in dashboard views, to allow business owners and managers to manage the business easily. QuickBooks, which is used by millions of small businesses, has a simple dashboard view, which you can see here. Other accounting/ERP packages, such as NetSuite, have extensive dashboard views.  For instance, you can tour the NetSuite dashboard views here. MyBizHomepage.com MyBizHomepage.com is a free Web-based application that includes a dashboard that works together with your QuickBooks data, called MyBizDashboard.  Once you import your QuickBooks data, it will display key parts of the data critical to the business owner on your screen when you log in.  For instance, MyBizDashboard also displays the age of outstanding Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivables, two metrics crucial to the health of your business.   “Seeing” this information laid out prominently on your screen is designed to help prevent receivables from going unpaid too long or getting behind in paying your bills. MyBizHomepage also provides email alerts to notify you if payables or receivables have gone past a predetermined age, and for other key metrics.  It has a private messaging feature built right in so that you can discuss any of the metrics with others on your team.  A new version of MyBizHomepage was recently rolled out with expanded features such as RSS feeds. SaaS administration screens The explosive growth of online business applications — software-as-a-service (SaaS) — has given business owners access to a range of “mini-dashboards.”  What I mean is that most SaaS applications have some kind of administration panel.  Those admin panels or screens often are filled with important data, including tables and graphs. Each of these administration screens is in effect a dashboard.  Chances are you are already using several of these dashboards. Administration panels are chock full of goodies that can help you understand some slice of your business better and manage it with foresight.  For instance, Google provides extensive information in its Google AdSense admin screens to help you see the status of your AdSense earnings.  Google Analytics provides multiple dashboard views of website traffic data, based on your role (executive, marketing, technical, etc.)  The downside to these administration panels is that they are scattered across the Web, and it’s hard to compare data from different applications. That leads me to my fourth type of “dashboard” — the Web’s free start pages. Start pages One way to organize data from multiple SaaS administration screens so you can access it  in one place is to use one of the free consumer start pages:  iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes — to name a few. I have cobbled together a rudimentary dashboard to run portions of my business, using Netvibes. In this example, I have used Netvibes to manage intelligence culled from some of the many online applications I use, via embedding widgets into a Netvibes page: The free start pages let you build a “master dashboard” that’s admittedly limited. They won’t support much customization. But for a cheap (i.e., free) solution that you can put together in a couple of hours without technical help, they allow you to organize your access to important information in SaaS applications and at least let you look at some of the information from one screen. Aside from these four inexpensive solutions, you can also purchase dashboard applications and port your business data into them, or you can hire a software programmer to create one specifically for your business. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

About 1938 days ago Business Software

Small Business Should Embrace CRM in 2008

I’ve been involved in with customer relationship management (CRM) in some capacity for the past ten years. During the past five years, my focus has been on helping small and mid-sized businesses understand how CRM can help them in finding, catching, and keeping good customers.  But CRM got slapped with a much deserved reputation as being too costly, too time consuming, too complex, and too disruptive to be successful.  Even though most of the horror stories were at the enterprise level, most small businesses were scared away from even thinking about implementing CRM.  Over the last few years, however, thanks to software-as-a-service CRM providers like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, CRM has rehabilitated its tarnished image.  Because of this, large enterprises along with mid-sized companies have opened up their arms and embraced CRM in its more affordable, easier, and accessible reincarnation.  And while a growing number of small businesses have also turned to CRM, the vast majority have not as of yet.  I think 2008 is shaping up to be the year when small businesses join the CRM party.  Here are a few reasons why. So that’s what CRM is Until recently many small business people still really didn’t know what CRM was and how it could help them. That shouldn’t come as a big surprise.  Performing a Google search on the term “What is CRM?” returns close to two million definitions for customer relationship management.  Formal definitions usually include the integration of people, process, and technology to maximize relationships and provide seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions.  But the emphasis was always on technology, which typically meant buying software and servers, and having IT staff at the ready.  This alone was enough to scare off the average small business with no internal IT staff.  So it was difficult in the past for small businesses to view CRM as anything other than technology.  But thanks to SaaS erasing most of the IT requirements of the past, small businesses are able to focus on the impact CRM can have on the issues important to them — like leveraging the Web to acquire new customers, selling more to current customers, analyzing the effectiveness of marketing activities, and providing better customer service to keep valuable customers happy.  All in the name of building stronger, longer lasting business relationships.  These are things any small business can understand if they can get past technology fears and industry jargon. Inheriting the Web Small businesses are looking to the Web to help them find, catch, and keep customers.  They are buying into the power the Web has in creating opportunities to reach more people at the most important time: when they are looking for products and services to solve an issue. They are using e-mail marketing, search engine optimization, and even dabbling in social networking in order to build relationships with customers and prospects.  And there are a number of CRM services on the market today that make it fairly easy to create landing pages, execute e-mail campaigns, and even manage search engine marketing campaigns.  Infusion Software, an SaaS CRM provider focusing on small businesses, even includes affiliate tracking to allow companies to keep tabs of business coming in from partners.  Concursive offers a suite that integrates CRM with website creation and content management.  And both Salesforce.com and NetSuite allow you to manage Google AdWord campaigns from within their services. Mobility is also important to small business people, as they spend less time in an office, but need to respond quickly and accurately to customers and prospects.  Providers like Salesforce.com and SageCRM.com are making it easier than ever to access CRM data and functionality on devices like the BlackBerry.  And NetSuite and other providers like EBSuite and HEAP have created interfaces specifically for the iPhone.   As our personal and professional lives converge and our dependence on the Web grows along with our need to do more while on the go, CRM providers have made it possible to for us to be respond quickly and meaningfully to customers. The Microsoft factor While it’s been around for years now, many small businesses have remained on the fence about both SaaS and CRM.  Even with Salesforce.com grabbing headlines and bringing attention to the space, small businesses haven’t been too comfortable with the idea of having their customer information outside of their premises.  But that may change with Microsoft’s upcoming Live CRM offering scheduled for release in the next couple of months. Microsoft has been offering CRM products for years now, but Live CRM is their first SaaS (or as they like to say Software and Services) offering.  And to millions of small business people who run their businesses with software like Office, Outlook, and Windows, Microsoft joining the SaaS brigade validates the service option in ways the smaller, lesser known companies haven’t been able to do.  So expect to see more small businesses giving CRM a second look with a less skeptical eye than they have before.  While Microsoft will bring in new customers because of their name, they will also bring more attention to the whole industry.  Small businesses will find lots of great options out there from companies like Infusion, Zoho, Salesboom, and others that are focused on serving the small business community.  Salesforce.com and NetSuite, of course, are still there leading the charge. The time is now With prices more affordable than ever and tools easier to use and accessible from anywhere, it looks like 2008 is the year small businesses move en masse towards CRM.  However, it also appears that the industry has finally moved towards small businesses by creating the products and services they’ve needed all along: the tools they need to build meaningful relationships with those looking for the products and services they provide. That’s what small businesses have been waiting for all along. Brent Leary is a small business technology analyst, advisor, speaker and award winning blogger.  He’s the host of “Technology… for Business $ake”, a weekly radio program on www.BusinessTechnologyRadio.com.   His popular blog can be found at www.brentleary.com.

About 2000 days ago Business Software

Make Mine To Go – Mobile Software-as-a-Service

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It was only a matter of time before two big trends in business computing collided, Web-based software and hand-held devices. Today, more software companies are putting their Web-based business applications, also called software-as-a-service (SaaS) on a widening number of mobile devices, including the Blackberry, iPhone, and handhelds that use the Microsoft and Palm mobile operating systems. Some of the latest versions of SaaS applications look and work the same no matter whether users tap into them from a mobile device, desktop, or laptop. Other software vendors offer SaaS apps on hand-held devices with somewhat less than 100 percent of the functions that are available to users logging on through standard PCs or laptops. Vendor developments Initially, software vendors partnered with middleware or value-added suppliers who created special interfaces to put SaaS offering onto mobile devices. But during the past year, vendors have started designing their own solutions. Some examples: NetSuite — When Apple unveiled the iPhone last summer, NetSuite simultaneously announced that its suite of Web-based business apps was 100 percent compatible with the new hand-held, thanks mainly to the fact that the pocket-sized device uses the same Safari browser as the Mac. NetSuite also uses three partners — iEnterprise, Antenna, and Explore Consulting — to port its SaaS products to other handhelds, says Mini Peiris, NetSuite’s vice president of product management. Salesforce.com — For years, Salesforce.com relied on middleware and other partners to create interfaces to put its customer relationship management (CRM) and other popular business software on customers’ Blackberry and Palm devices. In 2006, the SaaS pioneer acquired one of those vendors, Sendia, and has been actively marketing the technology, which works on Blackberry, Trio and Windows Mobile devices. According to Chuck Dietrich, vice president and general manager of Salesforce Mobile, the company’s SaaS apps also work on the iPhone. In November, the company began rolling out Salesforce Mobile, a technology that lets even non-technical mobile device users log on and, in a matter of minutes, set up and send applications to a sales team or other group. “In the mobile space that’s usually a Herculean effort that involves a lot of customization,” Dietrich says. “This takes the complexity out of mobile.” SAP — SAP hasn’t officially announced plans to put its Business ByDesign SaaS applications for small and mid-sized businesses on mobile devices. However, at the product launch last September, the German-based enterprise computing giant demonstrated how the software could work on a hand-held scanner with a credit card reader, similar to the kind that a field sales rep or service technician would use. Productivity boost Putting SaaS on mobile devices has been a boon to small business executives like Brian Kearne, chief financial officer of Circle of Friends, a Santa Monica, Calif., a children’s hair and skin care product maker. Initially, Kearne bought an iPhone for his own personal use. “To our happy surprise, we fired up the Web browser and we could access all of our business stuff on NetSuite,” Kearne says. Today, four of the company’s 12 employees access NetSuite via the iPhone, and No. 5 may be coming soon. “It’s definitely a productivity saver and allows people to be in touch with their critical business data while they’re on the road,” he says.

About 2030 days ago Business Software

Picking an SaaS Vendor: Upstart or Big Player?

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Small and mid-size businesses considering their software-as-a-service (SaaS) options have more choices than ever. The latest vendor to enter the on-demand market is SAP, the German-based enterprise software powerhouse whose small-business SaaS product was introduced in late September. Called Business ByDesign, the multi-application suite should be widely available in the first quarter of 2008. SAP joins Microsoft and Oracle, who continue to roll out small-business SaaS products. They’re following Web-only SaaS pioneers like Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc., which have built up strong user bases over the past few years. When weighing which vendor to choose, size shouldn’t matter, industry analysts caution. Instead, businesses should consider the same things they’d consider when evaluating on-premise software: first and foremost, whether a vendor offers the product that best fits a company’s need and has a core competency in what they’re selling. Beyond that, they need to be committed to the SaaS delivery model, says Erin TenWolde, lead SaaS analyst at IDC, a Framingham, Mass., tech industry researcher. To assess that commitment, she suggests quizzing vendors on their future direction, profitability and customer base, and asking to talk to existing users. Check contract terms SaaS contracts vary substantially, so a business should check the fine print for terms that fit its unique situation. Typical terms cover: Contract length — Some vendors allow customers to pay on a month-to-month basis, so contracts could be terminated with a month’s notice, says Robert DeSisto, vice president and application strategies analyst at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn., technology researcher. Other vendors require a two-year commitment, not always a good thing. “If you subscribed for 100 users for two years and six months later laid off 50 people, you’d still be paying,” DeSisto says. New releases — Vendors give customers varying amounts of time to upgrade to new releases. Some make customers jump to a new release immediately, while others give up to three months. Outages — As with upgrades, vendors’ guarantees of uninterrupted service are all over the map. DeSisto says he’s seen everything from no uptime guarantees to vendors who promise 99.7 percent uptime. Customization and customer service In addition to contract terms, companies need to consider whether a vendors’ on-demand software can be customized to fit a special business need, and how much customer support is available. According to IDC analyst TenWolde, forward-thinking vendors such as Salesforce.com host idea exchanges on their corporate websites where customers and business partners can discuss best uses of the company’s software. Good customer service is one way Web-only vendors are keeping customers now that bigger players have arrived. When Oriel Wines began using NetSuite’s accounting and finance software three years ago as a start-up wine distributor and reseller, there were no other options. Now that there are, Oriel managing director Kelly Ford wouldn’t consider switching, even though the New York City-based company has graduated to using on-demand applications for e-commerce and CRM. Says Ford: “We’re very happy.” When choosing a vendor, it all comes down to fundamentals, says DeSisto, the Gartner analyst. “You still have to have the right product, sales force, and marketing. A lot of vendors are preoccupied with being labeled SaaS but aren’t doing the proper work behind the scenes to make themselves have a viable offering.”

About 2061 days ago Business Software

ERP for Small Business: The Time is Ripe

The time is ripe for small and mid-size businesses to adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, according to leading industry analysts. There are more options than ever among the crowded ERP-vendor field targeting the small and mid-size business sector. Those options are, in turn, growing more affordable. In addition, many small and mid-size businesses are in desperate need of an upgrade to sophisticated software that was once the purview of only larger corporations. “Many small businesses have not upgraded their infrastructure since the Y2K cycle,” says Albert Pang, research director of enterprise applications research for Framingham-Mass.-based IDC. “Many of their systems need to be replaced.” Companies looking to update their financial, human resources, project management, and procurement applications will find that their needs will be met by ERP offerings, Pang says. A field crowded with vendors The good news is that there are many new choices among ERP programs available to small and mid-size businesses, Pang says, with over 30 vendors in the field.  And those vendors are looking to small and mid-size businesses as their primary growth market. An August 2007 Forrester Research report forecast that the small business sector will be “the most dynamic and innovative growth area” for ERP sales over the next three to five years. If comparison shopping a 30-plus market of vendors seems overwhelming, consider that many vendors offer specialty products to certain sectors or verticals. For example, Activant Solutions specializes in offerings to distributors, Constellation Software Inc. services club-membership-type businesses, and Deltek Inc.’s products target professional services providers. But ERP’s largest players — SAP, Sage Software, Oracle, and Microsoft — have more generic offerings that are increasingly tailored to smaller businesses. For example, Oracle is offering fixed-scope products, such as E-Business Suite and JDEdwards Enterprise One. These can be up and running in days to weeks, not months to years like previous, enterprise-focused ERP applications, says Pang. That timetable is crucial for small businesses, which want and need to see a quick return on their technology investments. And while costs can vary widely according to a company’s specific needs, the costs for more sophisticated software have really come down. “In the past, many of these products would cost seven figures, but now, they are available for under $100,000,” says Pang. Stiff competition and the emergency of on-demand products available over the Web have contributed to this trend, he says. Custom, on-demand solutions Another option for smaller firms is to purchase generic solutions and customize them with help from a value-added reseller or consultant, explains Gary Chen, senior analyst and small and mid-size business specialist at Boston, Mass-based Yankee Group. A wide range of add-on modules is available to develop the perfect custom application for every company. Still another option is ERP on-demand products for smaller businesses, such as those offered by NetSuite and SAP Business ByDesign. SAP’s product features a unique flat price: $149 per user per month, according to its website. With all these options, it’s a good time for smaller firms to go ERP shopping, says Chen. “There is so much more available now,” he says. “There’s never been a better time.”

About 2061 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Ready For the Next Computing Platform? It’s Ringing Now.

Some people use it to play music. Others marvel at the photo-browsing interface, and some of its users just want to look cool. I don’t care about any of those things when I look at the iPhone. What I see is the breakout of the next major enterprise computing platform. Not the humble cell phone, you say? It’s too small, too weak, too underpowered for serious productivity? If history matters, new computing platforms have always emerged from the low-end of the marketplace. The Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) minicomputer supplanted the IBM mainframe, then Sun’s Unix Workstations replaced DEC, and the PC replaced Sun. Now, the phone is going to surpass the PC. There’s no denying that cell phones have already played a huge role in boosting business productivity. We take for granted the tremendous shift that has taken place, from leaving a message with a secretary to being able to reach virtually anybody at any time, barring the occasional nap or airplane ride. But running business applications on these devices has been limited by bandwidth, screen size and particularly by “weak” browsers that don’t support things (like Java) that are required to run rich, browser-based applications. The iPhone has raised the bar and will finally deliver on what the mobility advocates have been pushing since the first cell towers went up. Two personal experiences opened my eyes to the inevitability of the cell phone as the next major computing device. The first was when we decided to bring our NetSuite application to the Japanese market. We found that to enter that market, a user interface that supported mobile phones was not an option — it was mandatory. No phone-based user interface, no sales in Japan. So in markets far more advanced than the US in terms of their use of mobile computing devices, the phone is already being doing much more than sending calls, texting and emailing. The second eye-opener was the day after Apple launched the iPhone. That Saturday morning, I logged on to the NetSuite user group and saw our users raving that NetSuite worked perfectly on the iPhone. While the iPhone was targeted as a consumer device, it was clear from the posts of these serious business people that it heralded a major transition for business as well. Apple may not have planned it, but by shipping with a complete Safari browser, they opened up an entirely new market because rich web-based business applications can now run on your phone. That doesn’t mean everything you do in an office today translates immediately to a phone. Just as there are still mainframes, mini-computers and workstations in use, the phone won’t eliminate the PC. But more and more work will get done on your phone. And the same transition we saw from keyboard-only mainframe applications to point-and-click mouse-driven interfaces is happening again, this time with designs that keep the needs of mobile users in mind. It is going to force software companies to think carefully about how they use that precious screen real-estate on the phone. If you still aren’t convinced, just wait, and the decision will be made for you by your best and brightest new hires. Never lose sight of what the college students of today are accustomed to. Living — not just communicating — on a small, handheld device is simply second-nature. They are so tied to these devices that their dedication, and the applications already being created for the latest vanguard of smart phones, is going to transform business five to ten years down the road.

About 2365 days ago E-Commerce

How to Make RSS Make Money for Your Business

It used to be that corporate intelligence — whether it was about customers or competitors — required hours of painstaking work poring through news clippings, analyzing webpages, and compiling notes on transactions, phone calls, and competitive coups to stay current. But now with RSS — short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary — up-to-the-moment data can arrive automatically in e-mail, RSS aggregators or be incorporated into a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Rather than forcing you to hunt for the required data, RSS sends the information automatically to you the moment it’s available. RSS channels, or “feeds,” provide instant notifications about updates or changes to a website. The technology first came into widespread use among bloggers, who wanted to notify readers about changes to their weblogs without having to organize and maintain a list of e-mail addresses. RSS aggregators, or “newsreaders,” were developed to access feeds automatically, saving the user the hassle of checking websites repeatedly for updates and changes. Business uses for RSS Business has found ways to expand RSS beyond simple convenience into the realm of strategic necessity. “Competitive intelligence and brand marketing are two of the bigger use cases for RSS,” says Todd Berkowitz, director of marketing for NewsGator, of Denver, Colo., one of the most popular RSS aggregators. “There has been a big push into enterprise RSS systems that give companies the ability to subscribe entire groups of people to feeds that don’t necessarily jump out and say, ‘Hey! This is RSS!” In many cases, the people within a company who most need the information that RSS can provide are among the least technically savvy. So it’s crucial to make RSS technically painless. NewsGator created an enterprise server product that lets companies manage feeds centrally, pushing data out to personnel in the best position to make use of it. Competing syndication solutions are available from Attensa and KnowNow. “Blogs and other social media tools are going to become an important part of doing business, but just how valuable are they without a way to read and aggregate them?” notes Trapper Markelz, a senior project manager at executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, which is using NewsGator to put critical information in front of its recruiters. “Delivering relevant, timely information in an easy-to-consume way is a challenge in most enterprises, but RSS is a great way to solve this problem. I expect it to become an indispensable technology for most businesses and be as ubiquitous as e-mail.” Incorporating RSS into CRM RSS feeds can be incorporated into customer relationship management software such as NetSuite to provide instant access to the latest news and updates about client companies. There is also PubSub, a Web service that filters through scores of RSS feeds to create new, custom channels based on keyword searches. RSS also lets companies keep track of who subscribes to which corporate RSS feeds and, perhaps more importantly, lets companies watch which news items subscribers choose to explore in greater detail. “Gathering market intelligence is the primary reason for having RSS,” says Carl Agers, vice president of client services and strategy at Decision Counsel, of San Ramon, Calif., a marketing consultancy. “You can build a profile on a subscriber to an RSS feed solely on an e-mail address and the pages they choose to view. Which feeds are they reading? Which words trigger what responses?” RSS also can provide customer leads. A New York private equity firm, for instance, uses the technology to receive instant notification whenever certain forms are filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including those that are required whenever a large number of shares are sold. “It’s a pretty good bet that the seller is flush with cash,” Berkowitz notes. “That would make them a good prospect to go after to invest in a private equity fund.”

About 2426 days ago Business Software

Chuck Your Software

I can still remember what it was like to install software in the 1980′s and early 1990′s, back when I was a student in high school and long before I started my own business. Floppy disks were the rage and many programs in fact fit on one or two disks. During the later 90′s through today, software has come installed on CDs and DVDs as they hold much more data than other media. But throughout this evolution of software nothing much has changed. As business people, we still have to install buggy software on slow computers and worry about the software we’re installing making another buggy program we rely on unstable. Installing software takes time as we click through message after message mostly displaying “next.” If you have more than one office or employees working out of the office, ensuring that they are using the latest software is not an easy task with traditionally installed software. Maybe you have a particular program that you want to roll out to all your employees and offices for better collaboration and communication. This task is NOT easy via a traditional server. A strong, reliable, and easy alternative involves using these applications as a hosted application or via the Internet. When an application is served over the Internet, all that employees need to do to access the application is open up their Web browser and point to the Web address of the application — no questions, no installation, no hassle, and no conflicts with other programs. This is why, with the urgency of popping popcorn in a hot microwave, more and more companies are serving software to small businesses via Web. The hosted application business is not new. Many of us have been taking advantage of the free e-mail services of Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google for years. Companies like NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and Intranets.com (now WebExOne) have been around, selling their applications as hosted applications paid for by the month instead of upfront like traditional software. However, what is new is that more “mainstream” applications or office suites such as spreadsheets, word processing, and databases are also being sold as hosted Web applications. Microsoft is the established leader in selling office suites for traditional installation on a PC. However, Google and other companies are aggressively challenging this dominance by offering their own office suites as hosted applications. Google and Intuit, which makes accounting software, announced in September that they are partnering to offer small business online advertising solutions (initially) within QuickBooks, software used mainly by small businesses. This is seen as a move towards migrating more small businesses towards hosted office applications. Another very hot market is e-mail hosting. E-mail hosting has been available to businesses for many years and several companies such as Blue Tie, MI8, and Singlefin have built up a loyal client base. However, with Google’s entry into the market, more companies have begun to consider using Web applications for one’s entire traditional software infrastructure. Sounds cool but what are the real benefits? Having software installed on your local computer or servers means that you (or a consultant or your IT person) have to maintain the software and the computer it’s on to ensure optimal performance. Software served via the Internet gives you the flexibility and freedom of not worrying about maintaining anything — because the company that now hosts the application maintains performance. If you want to save money and concentrate on your business while someone else concentrates on your technology, consider hosted applications. Of course, there are drawbacks. If you can’t access the Internet or the rare case that the company hosting your application goes down, you won’t be able access your information. And what about security? It’s true, information that is not hosted in-house is potentially less safe. So you’ll still need to follow some of the basic steps to protect your proprietary information: Make sure that your data is always backed up; and as you communicate via the Internet, take precautions to ensure that your connection is secure from hackers. As we move away from software installed on our business computers into the brave new world of Web applications, think of this move as the small business version of IT outsourcing. You get the IT expertise, but hopefully not the headaches. Ramon Ray is an author, speaker, technology writer and former small business technology consultant. He publishes Smallbiztechnology.com, a website that helps small and medium-sized businesses strategically use technology as a tool to grow their businesses.