(Part 2 of a 3 part blog series "Are You Ready to Move Beyond Email?" which focuses on Online Collaboration Suites for SMBs. Click here for Part 1, which provides an overview of the online collaboration suite area.) Effective collaborat...
Tag: SaaS
Are You Ready to Move Beyond Email? Assessing Online Collaboration Suites for SMBs
(Part 1 of a 3 part blog series "Are You Ready to Move Beyond Email?" which focuses on Online Collaboration Suites for SMBs) Collaboration is probably the only activity that everyone in every company engages in every day. Whether a CEO or new hire, an accountant or a construction worker, everyone needs to share and manage information, ideas, resources, and connections to get their job...
Dimdim–A Bright Light In the Web Conferencing Market
With the recession stubbornly lingering, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) are still pinching pennies and looking to trim expenses. Dimdim, which provides free Web conferencing for up to 20 users, and charges just $25 per month for Dimdim Pro (which supports unlimited meetings for up to 50 users) gives SMBs a way to eliminate or cut Web conferencing cos...
What is Business Intelligence, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published on July 30, 2010 in Small Business Computing) What is Business Intelligence? Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term used to encompass the processes, methods, measureme...
What is an Online Collaboration Suite, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published on June 30, 2010 in Small Business Computing) What is an Online Collaboration Suite? An online collaboration suite provides businesses with an integrated set of tools that span a range of collaboration needs. While not every collaboration suite includes the same capabilities,...
Will the Appliance Approach Gain Traction in the Wake of Recent Cloud Outages?
This week’s service outage at Intuit is fueling a new round of speculation about the dark side of cloud computing--and whether businesses can depend on cloud-based services to run their businesses. Intuit’s problems come on the heels of other service outages this month at Wordpress and Sage, and as well as service outages earlier this year at
Recent Vendor Briefing Highlights: IBM’s Cast Iron Acquisition
We are publishing recent vendor highlights on the SMB Group web site. As time permits, we discuss our key take-aways from more interesting briefings. I will try to remember to post them here as well. Here is the most recent one. Highlights: In May of this year, I
IBM’s Cast Iron Acquisition (6-17-10)
Highlights: In May of this year, IBM acquired Cast Iron Systems (for an undisclosed sum) to help customers more effectively tackle the challenges of integrating cloud and on-premise solutions. Cast Iron, which was founded in 2001 and has 75 employees, provides ...
There’s an App Store for That!
App stores focused on the needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs) seem to be proliferating quickly as cloud computing takes off. As discussed in “What is an App Store, and Why Should You Care,” a marquee SMB vendor, such as Google or Intuit typically builds the app sto...
What is Hybrid Computing, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published on June 9, 2010, in Small Business Computing) What is Hybrid Computing? A hybrid computing platform lets customers connect the packaged small business software applications that they run on their own internal desktops or servers to applications that run in the cloud. As discussed in