I attended SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW 2012 several weeks ago and am finally getting a chance to share my thoughts on the customer meetings I had at with Big Byte Corporation and KEEN Footwear at the event. These two customers are very “real” SMBs. BigByte has 52 employees; KEEN has 130. Neither is a Silicon Valley venture capital startup, which let’s face it, are a different breed. W...
Category: Small Business Software
SAP Business One, Chapter Two: Raising the Small Business Bar
In the world of SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs), SAP Business One is sometimes overshadowed by SAP Business All-in-One (BAiO), which has SAP’s large enterprise ERP at its core, and by and SAP Business ByDesign, which is SAP’s first software-a...
Tech Tidbits for SMBs: Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard and InsideView
While it's tempting to paint the "SMB market" with one broad-brush stroke, the term actually represents very fragmented terrain. You can slice ...
Making Small Business a Bigger Business: Intuit’s Acquisition of Demandforce
Intuit announced last week that it was acquiring Demandforce, which provides an integrated suite of Web-based social media and marketing tools for small businesses, for $423.5 million in cash. Demandforce automates many of the intern...
Intuit: From Products to Services, Applications to Platform
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Intuit’s Innovation Gallery Walk in NYC. Intuit uses the Gallery Walk to showcase new solutions that it is bringing to market as well as ones that are still in R&D.
Dell Extends its End-to-End Storage Story for SMBs
Storage is a key requirement for today's small-to-medium business (SMB) and mid-market enterprises. As the amount of data multiplies, and the need to protect critical data grows, SMBs now require many of the same data storage capabilities as larger enterprises. With these requirements in mind, Dell recently announced the ac...
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...
Dell Cloud Business Applications: One Stop Shop for SMBs?
Last week at Dreamforce 2011 , Dell announced Dell Cloud Business Applications, a new integrated, single sign-on approach to business solutions aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs) with 50 to 500 employees.In the first release, Dell Cloud Business Applications include Salesforce CRM, Boomi technol...
Is Salesforce.com Outgrowing SMBs?
Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...
The Impact of HP’s New Direction—An SMB Market Perspective
--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 strategy to get ...