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 [...]

Highlights from Iron Mountain Digital 2.0 Industry Analyst Meeting

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, [...]

Top Trends Most Evident at the 2010 Small Business Technology Summit

Back in the beautiful Live Free or Die state after attending the 2010 Small Business Summit earlier this week. This is a fantastic event coordinated by Ramon Ray and Marian Banker, and held at the Digital Sandbox in the financial district in New York. Whether due to Ramon and team’s hard work and great marketing, or [...]

SAP Aims for SME

I dialed into SAP’s SME (small and medium enterprises) Global Business Update Call a couple of weeks ago. Jeff Stiles, SVP, SME, Volume & Ecosystem Marketing, provided analysts a recap of recent SAP SME highlights, and shared strategic directions for 2010. I’ve been following SAP in the SME market since it acquired TopManage (which later [...]

What is Social Media Management, and Why Should You Care?

(Originally published on March 4, 2010, in Small Business Computing)
What is Social Media Management?
As described in the column “What is Social Networking, and Why Should You Care?” Internet-based social media make it easier for people to listen, interact, engage and collaborate with each other. But, as the volume of social media venues and conversations rises, [...]

2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions

Fellow SMB analyst Sanjeev Aggarwal and I have teamed up to bring you our top ten technology related predictions-plus three bonus predictions–for the SMB (companies with 1-1000 employees) market for 2010. Details for each prediction follow the list below.
Remember to vote for your top prediction here!
2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions
1. Pent Up SMB [...]

Top Takeaways from IBM’s General Business Influencer Summit

Last week, I attended IBM’s General Business (GB) Influencer Summit for analysts covering the mid-market (companies with 100 to 1000 employees and larger enterprises that are not currently spending a lot with IBM, sometimes termed “white space” accounts). I’ve attended this event since IBM began holding them a few years back. IBM recently [...]

PDFSalesLeads-A Clever Solution to the Pesky .PDF Problem

In our industry, vendors spend a lot of time and money developing white papers to educate prospects about new technologies. White papers that are well-researched and clearly written can help explain the value of  new or complex solutions to the audiences that can potentially benefit from them.
Of course, vendors also want to generate qualified sales [...]