Dell Boomi: A Microcosm of Dell’s New Virtual Era

After attending Dell World, Dell’s first ever user conference a couple of weeks ago, it’s apparent that Dell’s progression towards becoming a pivotal vendor in what it terms the “virtual era” is well underway. And, last week’s announcement of Dell Boomi’s Fall 2011 release provides a prime example of how Dell is crossing the chasm [...]

Becoming a Smarter Customer

—by Brent Leary, CRM Essentials, in partnership with 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 first [...]

Sage Summit 2011: Tackling the Sage NA Branding Challenge

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Sage Summit 2011, Sage’s first combination partner and customer event. I’ve been attending Sage partner, customer and analyst events for several years, observing and commenting on its ongoing attempts to unify it’s corporate brand across multiple small and medium business (SMB) solutions. Earlier this year, following Sue Swenson’s [...]

SAP Business One: Big Business Capabilities on a Small Business Budget

SAP has forged its corporate identity in the large enterprise space, serving the likes of Coca Cola and Dow Chemical. But, while attending SAP’s Sapphire user event last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Andreas Wolfinger, Global Head of Solution Management and Product Management for SAP Business One, and Jennifer Schulze, Director SME [...]

Pervasive Puts Its Galaxy Integration Community Into Orbit

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

Pervasive Puts Its Galaxy Integration Community Into Orbit

–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 [...]

The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event

Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo.
However, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged [...]

Dell and Boomi: Doubling Down on Integration

Originally published 4-26-11 as an SMB Group research brief in .pdf format, available here.
When big companies gobble up smaller ones, you always wonder whether the acquired company will get swallowed up into the belly of the beast, derailed or morphed into something unrecognizable.
In November, Dell acquired Boomi, which provides AtomSphere®, a cloud integration service that [...]

Intuit and Salesforce Partner Up: Who’s the Big Winner?

Last week, Intuit and Salesforce.com announced that they would partner to integrate Intuit QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online small business accounting software with Salesforce’s small business CRM editions (Contact Manager, Group and Professional).
Under the terms of the deal, Intuit will resell a pre-integrated version of the Salesforce CRM application via Intuit’s App Center (as well as [...]

SMB Group Top Ten 2011 SMB Technology Predictions

Here are the SMB Group’s Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2011! A more detailed description of each follows below.

1. Mobile Commerce Lifts Off
2. SMBs Demand that Vendors Bring Order to Social Media Chaos
3. App Stores Become a Key Information Source and Channel for SMBs
4. The Shift to Cloud Computing [...]