I’ve been tracking and writing about Dell since the late 1990s, when Dell was riding high on its success in essentially reinventing the PC and x86 markets with its direct and efficient supply chain model. Over the years, I have watched Dell go through several fits and starts as it struggled to move past its traditional hardware and product-centric comfort zone. Fast forward to...
Category: SMB
Top Customer-Facing Mobile Apps for SMBs Today–and the Trajectory for Tomorrow
How are SMBs using mobile solutions to interact with their customers, suppliers and partners? What are top mobile apps that SMBs offer for their external customers, partners and supplier to use? Just as important, what mobile applications are they planning to deploy? We found out in our recently completed SMB Group
The Yin and Yang of Mobile Applications For SMBs
What are SMBs top business challenges, and how well do mobile solutions help them meet these challenges? Interestingly, that depends on whether you’re asking them about the benefits of having their employees use internal mobile apps, or the value of offering mobile apps and mobile-friendly web sites for external customers, partners and suppliers to use. We asked more than 750 SMB (small busine...
YouDazzle: Where Cloud Collaboration Meets Network Marketing
In SMB Group studies, small business decision-makers consistently put colleagues, friends and family at or near the top of the list as key sources for advice when it comes to selecting technology solutions for their businesses (Figure 1). Figure 1: Who SMBs Turn to for Guidance About Technology Solutions
Intuit: From Products to Services, Applications to Platform
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Intuit’s Innovation Gallery Walk in NYC. Intuit uses the Gallery Walk to showcase new solutions that it is bringing to market as well as ones that are still in R&D.
What Can We Learn From This Year’s Holiday Season?
—by Brent Leary, CRM Essentials In conjunction with IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the fourth post in th...
Closing the Business Intelligence Gap for Small Businesses
Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can relate to Albert Einstein’s famous quote that “Information is not knowledge.” Many SMBs have plenty of data, but find it challenging to get the insights from it that they need to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently. Businesses have always needed the ability to track and measure critical success metrics in a quantifiable way. The p...
Cisco OnPlus: IT Infrastructure Advisory and Management Services Solution For Small Businesses
--by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group Last month, Cisco introduced a new IT Infrastructure advisory and management service solution designed for VARs to provide to small businesses with less than 100 employees. Delivered via Cisco’s value-added reseller (VAR) channel, Cisco OnPlus enables VARs to offload the mundane, time-consuming tasks of managing a network environmen...
Why Do People Create these Crazy Spam Replies to Blog Posts?!
Ok, just wondering...why???!!! Al Gottwald krast.net
Report Card: 2011 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions
--by Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group Before developing our 2012 predictions, we wanted to assess how we did on our Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2011. Here’s our take on how we did--let us know what grades you would have given us! And st...