Sanjeev Aggarwal’s Blog

—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 the series.
Christmas [...]

–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 environment [...]

Each year, the SMB Group offers its Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions. In 2011, we created a slideshow version. Due to popular demand, we’ve created a slideshow version of our 2012 predictions, which are summarized below.

Economic Anxiety Lowers SMB Revenue Expectations and Tightens Tech Wallets
The SMB Progressive Class Gains Ground
The SMB Social Media Divide Grows
Cloud [...]

Last week  we published a report card on our last year’s top 10 market predictions for 2011.
Here are the SMB Group’s Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2012! A more detailed description of each follows below.

Economic Anxiety Lowers SMB Revenue Expectations and Tightens Tech Wallets
The SMB Progressive Class Gains Ground
The SMB Social Media Divide Grows
Cloud Becomes [...]

Here’s an edited transcript of the podcast series that Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and Sanjeev Aggarwal, of SMB Group recorded with Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s midmarket division, about IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs.
If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast series, select below.
Brent Leary: We’re really excited [...]

—by Laurie McCabe, SMB Group

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 second post in the series. [...]

—by Brent Leary, CRM Essentials, in partnership with SMB Group
I recently bought a new video camera—a Panasonic AG-HMC150. This was a pretty significant purchase for me because it represents a step up into the semi-pro leagues, as I’m planning to do some documentary style programs. I kicked off my buying process with two things: a [...]

–by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group
After HP’s announcement that it would ditch it’s new Touchpad and put WebOS in mothballs, rumors leaked about it’s intentions to spin-off or sell it’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) PC business and acquire information management software vendor Autonomy for $10.2B. Combined, these moves confirm HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker’s [...]

Dell KACE recently introduced a new series of System Management Appliances targeted at small businesses with 20-200 employees. The Dell KACE M300 Asset Management Appliance is designed to deliver an affordable, plug-and-play IT asset management solution that reduces the repetitive, time consuming task of managing PC inventory and software licenses. The KACE M300 provides a [...]

–by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group
Pervasive announced Pervasive Galaxy at its annual Metamorphosis conference earlier this month. Galaxy merges an online integration marketplace and community into a single, streamlined platform. Pervasive has designed Galaxy to make remove boundaries between buyers and sellers and make it easier for end-user customers to understand options, review [...]

Co-authored by: Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials  SMB adoption of social media for sales, marketing, product development and customer service is on the rise – but how are SMBs tracking, analyzing and measuring the success of their social media endeavors?

In our joint SMB Group-CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium [...]

Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials
 
Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true.
Lester R. Bittel, The Nine Master Keys of Management

This seems to be especially true when it comes to getting business value out of social media. We recently [...]

Ten years ago, SMBs were just beginning to understand the need for and value of building web sites and storefronts. Today, SMBs are at a similar point when it comes to building mobile web sites and enabling mobile transactions. Why is this important? 4.8 billion users browse the web via a mobile device compared to [...]

As part of the recently completed SMB Group study “2010 Small and Medium Business Mobile Solutions Study,”
we performed a detailed analysis of U.S. small and medium business (SMB) spending on mobile devices, applications, and services. As explained in this study, SMBs (1-999 employees) spent approximately $26.1B on mobile solutions and services in 2010—an amount [...]

 
As a entrepreneur and a CEO of a small business who travels frequently, I have been looking for a business-class notebook that is sleek, lightweight, provides good performance and security, and is also affordable. Dell’s Vostro V130 meets these requirements and provides enhanced performance over the previous V13.
 
Figure 1: Mobile Workers (employees that travel [...]

Printer technology and use patterns have undergone rapid changes in the last few years. As prices have dropped, SMBs and home office workers are replacing inkjets with LED and laser printers.

Figure 1 – Dell’s new SMB Color LED and Laser Printer Lineup

Dell has significant market presence and share in the small and mid-size business (SMB) [...]

Over the past couple of years, Dell has been building a very significant set of IT solutions and services portfolio geared to providing small (which Dell defines as companies with 1 to 100 employees) and midsize companies (defined by Dell as businesses with 100 to 500 employees) , but more appropriately, “S” as companies without [...]

Small companies will tend to have a less formal purchasing process than their larger counterparts Typically only one or two people will have purchasing authority—usually the company officers in small businesses with the guidance of the IT person, if there is one.
How a company purchases or acquires technology products and services is affected by company [...]

Highlights: The overall annual growth in data volumes is beings driven by an increase in unstructured data created by social media and collaboration solutions, mobile solutions and rich media which is leading to much higher costs for information storage and management. This problem is further exasperated as the information creation moves from customer on-premises sources, [...]

The realities of a lingering recession and a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos continue to frame today’s economic climate. As entrepreneurs and small businesses went into financial shock beginning in mid-2008, they hunkered down and made do with older laptops (the dominant computing platform for these businesses) and other hardware instead of spending precious cash on new [...]

The topic of lead generation and the role of various media solutions in the lead generation process draw significant conversation. From a survey of small businesses done in the summer of 2009 and detailed in my blog, ‘GoToMeeting‘ from CitrixOnline or ‘Intuit Website’ from Intuit. This form of media effectively cultivates and nurtures demand. ‘Small [...]

In today’s fast-paced and volatile business climate, midsize businesses need a clear vision, financial agility, and strong collaborative capabilities to drive better-informed and more strategic business decisions. Mergers, acquisitions, new business models, and increasing regulatory requirements heighten the importance of having accurate, flexible tools to support corporate forecasting, budgeting, reporting, scorecard and compliance functions.

Many midsize [...]

Strong value in considering/purchasing ERP plus BI simultaneously/at the beginning of the implementation cycle

ERP solutions come with a reporting toolset consisting of a predefined set of reports and with general purpose query tools to generate reports from data within ERP database. Most often, these tools are difficult and confusing to use and rely on an IT team to [...]

This agreement provides an end-to-end applications development environment and marketing/sales channels for application developers to develop and market application solutions to small businesses. Key elements of the agreement include:

Broadening the applications developer community to develop SMB focused applications – Intuit to provide a SDK to help developers build applications on Microsoft Windows Azure Platform (and [...]

In today’s world overloaded with buzzwords, terms such as “Business Intelligence (BI)”, “predictive analytics” and “Corporate Performance Management (CPM)” are confusing to mid-market enterprises.

BI technologies provide historical views of a company’s business operation. Some of the enterprise –class BI solutions now include predictive analytical capabilities also. BI is a term used to describe the technology [...]

Good move by Cisco. The key beneficiary of Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg will be the SMB and mid-market. Cisco already has video Telepresence solutions. However, these Telepresence solutions are primarily enterprise solutions – way beyond the affordability of the SMB (1-499 employees) or the mid-market enterprises (500-1000 employees). Both segments together are referred to as [...]

 
Related insight to my recent blog Small Businesses interest in Social Media increasing rapidly , related to the Number of Years a small business has been in existence. See figure below:

Adoption and use of social media is correlated to ‘Number of years in business’ and indirectly to the age of the owners. As the figure [...]

In a recent very small business (businesses with 10 employees or less), Social Media ranked at the top of the list among the tools used by small businesses to market/promote their business (see Figure 1). The use of all ‘Digital Media’ tools by SMB has seen a dramatic increase in the past 2 years at [...]

SurveyGizmo is very easy to use; value priced and provides the most extensive set of features among all the survey software solutions I evaluated.

I came across a good analysis on some aspects of SaaS vs. on-premise vendors and solutions in the smoothspan post Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?

After reading through the post and various responses, I have some comments that could shed more light on the SaaS vs. on-premise topic and how this relates to [...]

Avaya has been in heavy competition with Cisco for the SMB and Mid-Market Unified Communications market, with Cisco steadily gaining market share in the SMB IP-communication segment. However, the combined Avaya-Nortel will position them with roughly twice the market share in the worldwide SMB market – close to 30%, almost 2X of Cisco.

The recent demise of LucidEra has brought forward the discussion of the need for BI in the SMB and Mid-Market enterprises (companies with 1-999 employees and revenues usually less than $1 billion). My take is that this was based on the limited BI value LuidEra offered and the current difficult economic conditions vs. their SaaS [...]

A 4-year total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective comparing cloud and on-premise business application deployment

One of the key technology pain-point (for SMBs) relate to multiple disparate SaaS/on-premise based business and collaboration applications that do not talk to each other (requiring re-entry of the same data) and each with their own separate access, UI, billing and pricing schemas – making it very difficult for them to resolve problems when they [...]

As the on-premise systems now support reservationless On-demand conferencing, they let employees hold impromptu meeting, without pre-scheduling these meetings – allowing them to collaborate when they need to, with whomever they need to, provided both parties have access to compatible video conferencing systems.

Vendors are recognizing the market opportunity and value of video conferencing solutions for [...]

The traditional contact centers now support more real-time communications technologies – VoIP, IVR, e-mail, IM. However, the intelligence and information repositories that are leveraged by these contact centers is very much static and internally focused.

With the growing popularity of social networking and community knowledge, where contact center agents can take advantage of consumers/customers helping each [...]

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress are all the range in the B2B and B2C world today. But does the SMB business owners/CEOs or a lone marketing person have the time to devote to track and follow these sites without spending an inordinate amount to time and effort – especially when there is [...]

In a recent Twitter Tweetchat discussion hosted by @sbbuss, majority of the small businesses mentioned #GoToMeeting as their solution of choice for Web Conferencing and Collaboration.
The web conferencing software and services market is becoming highly competitive, lead by the presence of a few major brands and a plethora of small vendor. Web conferencing is an [...]

The telecom dilemma is not new, the failure of telecom network service providers to leave their legacy technologies and embrace the all-IP world has not materialized as anticipated, especially in helping them generate significant revenues. They are still dependent on a handful of commodity services, even when one considers their cellular operations. They have not [...]

BroadSoft, the leading provider of hosted PBX platform, VoIP services and unified communications solutions is now supporting video communication solutions from the leading video communications vendors – Tandberg, Polycom and LifeSize.

As SMBs become more distributed and globalized, efficient communications and collaboration are becoming increasingly difficult with utilizing only applications like e-mail and audio conferencing solutions. [...]

As SMBs and mid-market enterprises are looking at their IT budget and face the realities to cut them, they look at what is discretionary and what can be supported through innovative IT strategies. However, at the same time they need to adopt new technology solutions that will make them more competitive in the current economic [...]

The convergence of web delivered IT services – Cloud Computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Hosted Applications, Software-as-a-Service, Virtualization – will continue to redefine and add value to the SMB/mid-market IT services landscape, especially in the current economic climate.

Our outlook calls for rapid increase in adoption of various Cloud Computing and Managed Services components over the next 2-3 years [...]

With today’s ‘Dynamic Infrastructure’ initiative announcement, IBM is positioning itself as a holistic technology solution and service provider and partner. It combines all the element of separate cloud delivered services (cloud based, managed, and on-premise) and also traditional on-premise hardware, software and services.

Managed Services

Cloud Computing

Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Traditional on-premise based software, hardware and service

If IBM [...]

In today’s tough economic times, driven by higher travel costs, staff reduction, and tight credit – SMB are turning to solutions that will reduce costs and provide clearly identifiable short-term ROI. In the past year, conferencing solutions service providers that provide hosted audio and integrated web/video conferencing services are experiencing dramatic increases in adoption of [...]

Recently (December’08), I had the opportunity to participate in a CFO/CIO panel with participants from New England SMB/mid-market businesses, organized by Managed Technology Partners. The topic of the panel discussion was ‘What key IT initiatives that are still being considered and issues to be considered in the decision-making processes’. Looking at the current turbulent economic [...]

Cloud computing and services include any subscription-based service that is delivered over the internet in real time, providing flexibility by extending an enterprises internal IT resources, staff and expertise. It encompasses several of the web-based solutions/services listed below.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service:

A way to add computing, storage and bandwidth capabilities in real-time without investing in additional in-house IT infrastructure [...]