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, measurements and systems businesses use to more easily view, analyze and understand information relevant to the history, current performance or future projections for a business.  Other terms that people often [...]

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, they often feature tools such as business email, instant messaging, contact management, [...]

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 [...]

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, IBM acquired Cast Iron Systems (for an undisclosed sum) to help [...]

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 hundreds of pre-built templates and a “configuration, not coding” approach to help streamline and shorten [...]

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 store and serve as the anchor tenant [...]

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 What is Cloud Computing and Why Should You Care?, more software [...]

What Does Cloud Computing Mean for the Channel? Presentation at Sage Insights 2010

What Does Cloud Computing Mean for the Channel?

Last week I attended  2010 Sage Insights, Sage Software’s annual partner conference, and had the opportunity to present Perspectives on the Business Model of the Future: What Does Cloud Computing Mean for the Channel? twice at the event.
This was a timely topic for Sage partners, particularly in [...]

Acumatica’s Best of Both Worlds ERP Story

Just want to let you know that we are publishing highlights from recent vendor briefings on the SMB Group web site. As time permits, we discuss our takeaways from the more interesting briefings. I’ll try to remember to post them here as well. There are several up there already, here is the most recent one.
4-23-10
Highlights:
Acumatica [...]

Does Your SMB Marketing Message Need a Makeover? Seven Questions to Ask

Countless technology vendors are targeting the increasingly coveted yet still somewhat elusive small and medium business (SMB) market. We do our share of message testing and market strategy work with them, and attend innumerable briefings from other vendors aiming to make their mark in this crowded space.
All too often, we see some warning signs that [...]