If you're in the IT industry, tweeting has probably become a regular part of your day, like brushing your teeth. I know it has for me, as an industry...
Author: Sanjeev Aggarwal
Closing the SMB Business Intelligence Gap
Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can relate to Albert Einstein’s famous quote that “Information is not knowledge.” Many SMBs have plenty of data, but find it challenging to get the insights from it that they need to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently. Businesses have always needed the ability to track and measure critical success metrics in a quantifiable way. The p...
Are You Ready? Transforming Your Business for the Smarter Customer
—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 secon...
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 from a product-centric hardware vendor to a sol...
Becoming a Smarter Customer
—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 question and a search. I posed a question to my f...
The Bank of IBM: Open for Small and Medium Businesses
SMBs comprise nearly 65 percent of global GDP, account for more than 90 percent of all businesses, and employ over 90 percent of the world’s workforce. As such, SMB growth is crucial to the global economic recovery. But, as anyone that’s every run a small business knows, lack of financing often gets in the way of business growth. In fact, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) indicates t...
Top 10 Collaboration Tools Small Businesses Use Today–and the Top 10 They Plan to Add
What are top tools that small businesses use for collaboration? As important, which ones are they planning to add in the next 12 months? We asked more than 800 SMB (small business is 1-99 employees; medium business is 100-999 employees) decision-makers and influencers these questions in the recently completed SMB Group and CRM Essentials
The Small Business Forecast for Cloud Computing
(Originally published October 5, 2011 in Small Business Computing) What’s changed about cloud computing since 2009, when I wrote
The Collaboration Advantage for SMBs
How collaborative is your business? Do you tend to favor and reward individual accomplishments or team achievements? And how does your corporate collaboration culture affect your business? These are just a few of many questions we asked in the recently completed SMB Group and CRM Essentials
Key Themes from SAP TechEd 2011–How Do They Relate to SMBs?
As the name implies, SAP TechEd offers technical education, such as hands-on workshops, deep-dive lectures and sessions with SAP technical experts about all things SAP. That said, TechEd isn't for everyone, and it’s no wonder that most of the 6,500+ attendees at SAP TechEd 2011, held the week of September 12 in Las Vegas, were SAP partners and technology specialists from the vendor’s large ente...