This is the second part of a blog post about the best Cloud computing predictions related to small businesses.

In Part 1, we looked at the hot Cloud-based application categories that are likely to get the most tractions with small businesses

In this article, we focus on the most importnat underlying trends in small business cloud computing.

The right conditions are met for Cloud mainstream adoption - SMB-Group

The SMB-Group has identified several factors that have coalesced to create the right conditions for cloud computing’s increased popularity:

• Cloud computing providers have grown up. NetSuite was founded in 1998, and Salesforce.com was founded in 1999
• Cloud vendors continue to address reliability, security and performance concerns with more redundant services and controls
• Customers have also learned that they like many things about the cloud model. They like the responsibility being on a vendor 24/7 — and that it’s easier to switch to another provider if their expectations aren’t met.
• Cloud is increasingly the critical enabler for both mobile and social solutions

Increasingly, small businesses that want to use technology to move their businesses ahead are looking at moving to the to the cloud

Cloud-based business apps are actually designed for businesses - gaebler.com

While the last generation of business software was created to optimize the back-office (i.e. making accounting easier and keeping up with tax rules), this year’s crop of business software will focus on creating value for small businesses, connecting customers and suppliers in a network and making it easier for small business owners (not their accountant) to do business.

Additionally, Cloud based apps get easier to use each day and the best part is that as the development team makes a change, businesses immediately benefit.

A solution like BrightPearl is a great example of this new breed of cloud-based apps.

Mobile use extends beyond email to business applications – SMB-Group

In a research by the SMB-Group, small businesses indicated that they plan to significantly increase spending on mobile devices and services in the next 12 months, with the highest jump in the 5-to-49–employee size band. The study revealed that with mobile use of collaboration apps (email, calendar, etc.) now mainstream, small businesses are “mobilizing business”.

Some of the strongest categories for small business current and planned mobile app use are mobile payments (52%), time management (59%), online field service (59%), and customer information management (69%). This rapid uptake will also include more vertical apps that are a perfect fit for industry-specific needs, especially given the choice of both smart phone and tablet form factors.

HTML5 is shifting how we look at apps and software – Small Business Trends

Right now, the browser is central to how we use web-based solutions, but as more users operate remotely and via mobile devices, there is solid evidence that the browser could go away, or at least become dramatically different from what we experience today.

This is not really a prediction, but HTML5 makes it possible to add functionality to the browsing experience. If Adobe’s recent decision is any indication of the trend, they terminated their mobile Flash development work to migrate to HTML5. Apple and Steve Jobs have long refused to work with Adobe’s Flash.

Many businesses will follow the federal agencies’ “cloud first” policy – Cloud Business Review

US Government instructs Federal agencies to adopt “cloud-first” policy whenever possible – considering the best cloud solutions to cut the Gov’t IT budget; it is a success. So, expect businesses to adopt the same “cloud-first” policy when considering new system purchases.

Cloud adoption is going global – Montclair Advisors

If the US is still leading the pack in terms of Cloud apps adoption, there is evidence that countries like the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia in Europe but also Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Japan, China will continue to build on the Cloud market’s growing global momentum.

If you are a small business you can use our  free ressources to discover and compare online business software.

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Image courtesy of Flickr user Seven Morris

Through the end of last year and beginning of this year, we have been reading tons of blog posts from industry leaders about Cloud computing predictions related to small businesses.

So we decided to do a bit of curation work and share with you what we believe are the most relevant ones to small business owners.

We broke them down into two high-level topics and share a link to the referring blog in case you want to know more on a specific subject.

Part 1: Cloud-based application categories that are likely to get the most tractions with small businesses

Part 2: Underlying trends in small business cloud computing

Today we are covering the first part about product categories.

Part 1: Hot Cloud-based application categories

Increased adoption of collaboration and communication services in integrated Suites – SMB-Group

The SMB-Group is seeing a trend where small businesses are swinging from point solutions for voice, communications, social media and collaboration solutions to integrated application suites.

Medium businesses are leading the charge, with 28% currently using an integrated collaboration suite, and 35% planning to do so in the next 12 months.

Small businesses are slower to make this leap, but a transition is under way here too.

By moving from disparate point solutions to an integrated offering, SMBs can avoid the hassles of learning to use multiple user interfaces, going to different sites to login and remembering different passwords—in short, things that waste time and frustrate users. They also can lower costs and improve their ability to collaborate effectively.

A growing roster of low-cost (or free), easy-to-use integrated collaboration suites (Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, IBM LotusLive, Zoho and HyperOffice, to name a few) are adding fuel to the convergence fire—although vendors will still need to address the obstacle of user resistance to learning something new

Business intelligence and Big Data – Small Business Trends

Huge amount of  data ( this is called “Big Data”) is moving to the cloud. Vendors are offering affordable business intelligence apps and easy to access and analyse tons of information in order to understand opportunities, competitive threats or market trends.

Social data continues to mushroom, leading small business owners to need better business intelligence (BI) tools. Of course, many small businesses are still using spreadsheets to mine data into intelligence. It is possible, but a lot more work. Solutions such as Zoho Reports or Bime Analytics, have an affordable small business offering.

According to the SMB-Group 16% of small and 29% of medium businesses purchased/upgraded a BI solution within the past 24 months, and 16% and 28%, respectively, plan to do so in the next 12 months.

Many of small business consider 2012 as the “year of big data”.

Scheduling continues to go Cloud -Mashable

Small businesses are leaving behind the appointment book in favor of online scheduling automation automation. The success of sites like Schedulicity, OpenTable, Sester and ZocDoc only reinforce the idea that the traditional pen and paper appointment book may see its demise in 2012. Schedulicity alone has seen nearly 7 million appointments booked online since mid-2009.

Customer service goes community - OpenForum

The cable provider Comcast launched Comcast Cares, a social media push to repair a poor customer-service perception. It set the bar for how brands need to engage with their customers in the always-on, always-public world of social media.

As the toolset of online customer services apps evolves with players like Desk.com,  ZenDesk and Get Satisfaction, businesses of any size can provide incredibly high-tech support without losing high-touch service.

Small business will embrace the community in a peer service-provider model and start providing service in public-facing, brand-building ways. They will embrace tools that turn customer service into a shared community model, where customers help answer questions and evangelize the products and services.

Online storage is seeing fast growth - Montclair Advisors

As more and more data is stored in the Cloud, businesses are looking to all different types of on-line storage services.  During the year that Apple launched its iCloud small business storage service, we also saw major investment rounds for online storage companies including Dropbox and Box.  We even saw a new IPO from Carbonite that provides a small business/consumer Cloud back-up service.

These investments are a sign that investors are expecting a steep usage growth from small businesses for this product category.

IT Management and Security SaaS offerings emerge – Montclair Advisors

Companies like CA have been successful in launching their new Nimsoft ITM SaaS offering during 2011, but there are also many other firms that are beginning to gain momentum with their new SaaS offerings as well.

This is a very big market opportunity to replace existing legacy infrastructure and security offerings. Companies to watch include Service-Now, Trustwave, Splunk, PingIdentity, Proofpoint and New Relic

CRM and Social CRM will continue to grow at a steady pace – GetApp.com

We also ran a poll recently on LinkedIn were voters identified CRM and Social CRM  as a fast growth category in 2012 ahead of collaboration tools.

Tomorrow we will cover the second part of this post on the underlying trends in small business cloud computing.

If you are a small business you can use our  free ressources to discover and compare online business software.

If you like this article, follow us on Twitteror FaceBook and grab our GetApp.com blog feed

Image courtesy of Flickr user Digital Sextant

Salesforce.com just unveiled Desk.com, which is likely to open the world of online customer service to thousands of small businesses.

Desk.com is the new name for Assistly.

Saleforce.com bought Assistly in September 2011 after an initial strategic investment in the company. Assistly was one of the greatest startup success story last year as the company founded by Alex Bard only launched in September 2010.

But there is much more to this news than just a name change and the new Desk.com promises to revolutionizing customer service for small businesses.

Let’s see how you can benefit from this solution.

Be “customer obsessed” with an online help desk

As we have been preaching consistently on this blog, small businesses should be customer obsessed.  To become a customer-obsessed company, small businesses need to invest into ways to get insight and knowledge on how to engage with their customers, wherever they are. Companies need to follow customers into new markets or channels and react fast to any support need.

One of the best way to fulfill this goal of ” always on customer satisfaction”  is to systematically monitor and anticipate support requirements.

This is where new online help desk applications kick in. They enable businesses to listen and respond to their customer needs beyond their own website. These apps are social, mobile and simple to use and deploy.

It is the door for businesses to start delivering personal customer service in a social and mobile world. With tools like Desk.com any business can instantly work with customers over any major social network, even when your staff is on the go.

Support your clients on FaceBook, Twitter and on your mobile

If you think about it, there are more social networking users than email users. Even if your business is not targeting FaceBook addict teenagers, it is very likely that your customers will be discussing your business and services on social networks. You need to know what is happening, you need to respond to their need. You can surprise them by supporting them where they don’t expect to hear from you.

Desk.com will easily integrate your help desk with Facebook and Twitter together with other support channels like email, phone and web.

And good customer support is timely. As most small businesses have some of the staff on the road, Desk.com will also enable you  to stay connected with your customers while your staff is on the go so you can support them anywhere at anytime.

It easy and affordable for everyone, no more excuses to wait

A reason why Desk.com is likely to get massive adoption by small businesses is that it is easy to sign-up and easy to get started. It requires just a couple of days and you don’t need IT staff .

Some cool features offered by Desk.com are:

• iPhone & Android friendly apps, or any smartphone that supports HTML5
• Respond  from anywhere to a support request with instant access of all your  information you can quickly respond to support cases
• Not only you can respond to cases  on the go,but you can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases
• Easy to set up. you only need to respond to four fields to register
• Easy to deploy, with a pre built checklist you can train and get your employees started
• Easy to use, agents are using a sleek “Agent Desktop” with an intuitive user interface that is as easy to use as Facebook or Gmail
• Easy reporting, with the ability to see at a glance the most important metrics detailing how every aspect of your customer service is performing (how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened). This feature is announced for Q1 2012.

Another reason that should make Desk.com a success, is that it is affordable. Your first full time support agent will be free and you should be looking at spending about $49 per month per additional agent for unlimited usage. Flex pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. The mobile app is available at no additional cost .

So if like most businesses you have a fair volume of inquiries to deal with and a little staff to rely on, you may want to check Desk.com as an easy and affordable way to start supporting your clients where they are and make customer service everyone’s job in your company.

Get your Desk.com Free Seat

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Our software evaluation partner Eval-Source have published an interesting post where they share their experience about the mistakes small businesses make when evaluating software for their business, often leading them to overbuy.

When looking at evaluating software small businesses tend to:

evaluate too many solutions

forget to work with an evaluation script

be mislead by cool but useless features

forget their main objective

Let’s look into these mistakes in more details and how they can be mitigated.

Mistake #1: Too many vendors on the list

The first problem, is that businesses start the evaluation with too many vendors.

They usually go through the painful process of:

• understand the business requirements
• selecting all the vendors on the long list
• collecting all the research necessary to understand the features/functions, pricing, integration points
• educate the rest of the team
• manage the demos, trials and all the questions, answers and content provided by the vendors

If the list of vendors is too long, managing, sharing and keeping the data collected becomes difficult as there is much to sort through.

A good starting point to narrow the long list of vendors prior to starting the evaluation process is to use a business software marketplace with side by side comparison capabilities. Using these services will allow you to get started your evaluation process with no more than 3 solutions.

Mistake #2: Lack of a demo script

The second problem when taking an online demo or inviting vendors for demonstrations of their software is that without a set demonstration script you won’t be able to compare apples with apples. Demos will show you all the functions and cool features the software is capable of providing while not solving the original business problem that you identified.

Be sure to always have a precise script before evaluating a software and only compare on what was included in your original evaluation scope.

Mistake #3:  Being misled by features

A third problem is that the features shown during a demo become the actual evaluation criteria. Vendors will show a plethora of different features and this can lead to selecting the incorrect system.  It often introduces additional project scope and can lead to buying unnecessary functionality and wasting company money.

Be careful not to wander off the original intent and scope of the software as is it can impact your ROI and force you to throw too much money in the original software selection.

Mistake #4: Forget the objective

A forth problem is alignement with the main objective.  Businesses can easily get caught up with the luxuries of the software and might not realize the extra resources that the company will need during and after the implementation.

Make sure that you strictly stick to what you need to meet your initial objective. . Don’t get caught up in unnecessary complexity that will blow up your budget.

These four mistakes can be mitigated if you do not jump straight to vendor demonstrations when proceeding with a software evaluation. Get your objectives straight, narrow the list of vendors you will look at, build a demo script, don’t be impressed by unnecessary features and make sure that you don’t over buy.

If you need some help in preparing your software evaluation, you can:

Download the Best Practices for Software Selection eBook

Or contact us for Free Software Advice from our in-house experts or software evaluation partners Eval Source.

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Picture courtesy of Flickr user opensourceway

In continuation to our article about the age of the customer, explaining why small businesses need to be customer obsessed, we stumbled upon a great article from our cloud consultants partners VM-Associates.

They pick on the example of  luxury stores to explain how small businesses can learn from customer support best practices and they refer to online customer support software as a way to make customer service accessible to any company.

Here is the opening question: When you go shopping in a luxury store, why do you choose one and not the other?

Their guess: your interpersonal relationships and history with the people behind the stores.

Have a solution for your customer problems

This principle can be applied to any business model: happy customers are the backbone of a successful company, and the best way to keep your clientele happy is through responsive, eager, and welcoming relationships. Yes, we’re talking about customer service.

If your customer has a problem, you have a solution. If your customer has a question, you have an answer. The customer owns the store.

Of course, many businesses don’t have the luxury of the grocery store. They don’t have staff to train to smile: relationships are managed virtually. That’s tough.

To make things worse, traditional online customer service solutions have been geared toward enterprise-level companies, with huge CSR departments. That’s not conducive to good customer service for small businesses.

Customer service for everyone

Luckily, that’s all changing. New user-friendly SaaS applications are making customer service accessible to everyone who needs it, at affordable costs. VM-Associates have developed a partnership with Zendesk, a leader in cloud-based customer service and help desk software, and they are ecstatic about it.

They use Zendesk internally, they’ve setup dozens of clients with Zendesk solutions, and they’re happy to see 100% positive feedback. They qualify it as “good stuff”.

VM-Associates pride themselves in being accessible to their clients and know that without happy customers their business would crumble. Zendesk helps them deliver customer service as though they know their customers in a neighborhood type way.

There are many other online customer support software applications, but whatever the solution you use, happy customers equals prosperous business.

If you haven’t already, think through your current support system and consider whether you can’t do better.

Cause you probably can!

Check different online help desk software options with reviews and comparison tools

This post has been written in collaboration with Daniel at VM-Associates.

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Picture courtesy of Flickr user by RW PhotoBug

Just as we expect telephone service to be available 24/7/365, we increasingly expect Internet or Intranet based services to be available without interruption.

To provide this quality of service, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers have to be able to detect and respond instantly to any unforeseen events that may affect their service, and resolve problems before anything breaks.

This means that they have to be able to monitor all aspects of their operation that can alert them to potential service degradations and help them find and fix the root cause of problems.

Librato Metrics is designed for use by DevOps (a new function in IT organizations that bridges the gap between development and operations and a major movement, specifically in PaaS and SaaS companies) and operations teams to monitor their SaaS and PaaS infrastructure and applications.

It enables them to store any and all metrics they need to track the health of their operation, to configure alerts, visualize the metrics in graphs, build dashboards, and perform root-cause analysis. We will look at its interface, features, and see how it can be of use to you.

THE CASE FOR METRICS

Librato spun out of Virginia Tech University with a Checkpoint/Restart product for High Performance Computing. “In 2010, we changed direction and used our technology to launch the “Silverline” Application Resource Management service. After numerous requests from customers we followed that up in 2011 with the launch of the Metrics service,” says Fred Van Den Bosch, CEO of the company, “we saw an urgent need with SaaS and PaaS providers for a uniform environment to manage all of their metrics, and a similar need in the emerging “Internet of Things”, where sensor networks are expected to generate volumes of metrics that far exceed those of the Internet today”

USING METRICS

What differentiates Librato Metrics from more traditional monitoring services is that it is a “platform” for storing, visualizing, correlating, and acting on any and all metrics organizations collect. This means that all of its capabilities are accessible through its RESTful API’s, allowing its users to send it all the data they collect, be it with existing open source or commercial collection agents, environment-specific collection agents, or directly from applications that are instrumented for data collection.

Since Metrics is delivered as a service, it can be deployed in minutes, and does not require any hardware and software resources to be deployed. By using Metrics for monitoring data, DevOps and Operations teams need to be familiar with just one way of storing and visualizing data, and setting up alerts. By viewing all of their metrics through a single set of graphs and dashboards they can more easily correlate between metrics from different sources.

Metrics are grouped based on the sources they originate from. For example, sources can be server instances or application instances, and CPU usage and memory usage can be metrics associated with a server instance. In addition, we were told that it will soon be possible to us tags to organize your sources in whatever way you like and configure graphs with metrics you want to see together. You can also configure alerts to send a message or invoke an action when thresholds on a metric are crossed. Alerts can be tied to standard service hooks like email, Pagerduty or Campfire, or custom Webhooks you set up yourself.

To collect data, you can either use Librato’s library of open-source  collection agents, write your own custom collection agents or send data directly from your applications through language bindings. Currently, Librato supports Statsd, Collectd, Rack-statsd, and Sensu collection agents and language bindings for Clojure, Python, Go, Ruby and Java.

Van Den Bosch says that SaaS and PaaS companies can also embed Librato Metrics in their service to allow their users to monitor their use of the service. The Metrics APIs allow them to either just use the storage capability, the graphs, or the full dashboards offered by Metrics, depending on their needs.

Van Den Bosch says that the application is especially useful for companies that use a combination of open source, commercial and custom built tools to monitor and manage their SaaS, PaaS or IT infrastructure and companies that deploy sensor networks. ”With its library of open source collection agents and language bindings, Metrics makes it possible to have a unified environment for storing visualizing, analyzing and acting on all data that needs to be monitored,” he says. “Our users can focus on using their expertise to build solutions for their customers, and can leave the management of the monitoring data to Metrics.”

THE BASICS: WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

With its surreal black and green interface, this one’s a winner. For a technical application, such as this, a simple interface can considerably help non-technical people like me. And, I was not disappointed. Each task or action is not more than two clicks away. What’s more, the interface is task-driven. This means each click is rationed to perform a task. I especially liked the fact that the interface gets right down to business with the attributes and alerts tab.

SUPPORT

The application comes with a comprehensive knowledge base. In addition, customers can access their live chat room, where they can interact directly with support and development engineers.

IS IT FOR YOU?

Yes if you are interested in measuring data and run a SaaS or PaaS service, then this is an invaluable and scalable service to help you track and measure service data.

Ratings: overall rating 4/5, ease of use 4/5, features 4/5, value 3.5/5 and ease of deployment 4/5

Try Free Demo

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You might have read our article on Why Small Businesses Need to be Customer Obsessed at the beginning of January.

To complement this article we would like to show you how GetApp.com is highly engaged in applying a customer obsessed approach.

One of the best practices we follow is to put our users into the centre of our design and development. The way we do this is by getting feedback from real users throughout the product development.

Have you tried guerilla testing

Here is an example: Let´s remember for a moment our infographic covering The 25 Most Important Online Project Management Solutions. Before releasing it, we ran a guerilla testing to check how well people understood the different elements of the infographic. By the way, for those not familiar with guerilla testing, don’t think we ambush some users in some sort of design warfare! We just went on the street and asked a few people to have a look at the infographic and tell us what they thought and understood. We strongly believe that the success of our infographic partly came from the guerilla testing which now belongs to one of our best practices.

We value your input…a lot

As part of our latest project, our design team is now looking to understand what areas of our website we need to improve in order to better service small and medium companies and help them discovering and choosing the business applications they need to improve their business.

This is your chance to influence us!

If you use online business apps you can become part of GetApp.com´s customer-obsessed approach and tell us what you like and what we need to do better.

Before getting started with the survey

1) First familiarize yourself with our business software marketplace
2) Imagine you need a business app and you come to our marketplace to compare and choose the best one for your needs
3) Spend as long as you need and visit all the areas that you consider adequate to achieve your objective
4) Take our survey. Love it or hate it, we are looking forward to know all your thoughts

In exchange for your time and insights, when you complete the survey, you will automatically enter in a prize draw. If you complete the survey one Amazon Kindle Fire can be yours!

So get yourself a coffee, fill out the survey and check that we are walking the talks by taking your feedback on board.

Cloud computing may be cutting edge technology, but the majority of people using it in the future won’t be tech junkies. So don’t treat them as such.

The days of advertising cloud — or even traditional web hosting — by whacking up pictures of servers, some details about data centres, and a great price in a starburst graphic are over. With everyone from my corner store to my uncle now running websites, server technology went mainstream a long time ago.

Who cares about servers

The customer is about as interested in what a server looks like as my mum is in the copper wire buried under her house to connect her telephone. She doesn’t need to know how it works to want to buy a phone. She just has to have a reason — talking to me, of course.

Cloud computing — and the innovative cloud-based apps, websites and web services built upon it — is similarly challenged with separating the customer goal from the technical complexities that make it all happen if it is to grow beyond a niche group of technically-minded early adopters.

When was the last time you saw a car ad that actually lifted the bonnet and showed you the engine? It’s all about the experience of driving along open country roads in snug upholstery with the family in the back.

There will always be the car aficionados that want all the info on horsepower, torque, and all that other stuff they prattle on about on Top Gear that melts my brain (I just want to watch them smash caravans again). But for every one of those, I guarantee there are many more choosing a car based purely on the experience of driving it, not tinkering with it.

I put oil in my engine when I have to, not because I want to. I only want to be aware of the engine when something is going wrong or requires attention – otherwise I want to forget it exists.

And car manufacturers understand this. Make the technology invisible and concentrate instead on marketing a better and more comfortable driving experience to get from A to B.

The Cloud is nothing more than an enabler

People are adopting cloud services to get from A to B as well — from an idea to launching a digital piece of brilliance capable of reaching thousands of people. Only the geekiest tech obsessive would have the goal of an infrastructure they can boast about down the pub by comparing CPU power with their mates. The cloud is an enabler, nothing more, making otherwise quite disparate projects possible.  Once running, most users hope not to have to think about it again, instead moving on to making their project the best it can be.

Understanding those highly varied goals and meshing them with cloud technology in the most seamless way possible is driving the next round of cloud innovation.

How can cloud computing — in all its forms — better facilitate the digital projects of tomorrow with the least amount of friction?

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Picture credit to Flickr user Rocío Lara

Redux is a Latin word, which means to lead back.

This week’s review is a redux post of sorts. We reviewed business-to-business support software TeamSupport back in February 2011.

Much has changed since then.

The company has come out with a new version of the same product and has bundled in great features to boot.

In this post, we will take a fresh look at TeamSupport once again. We will look at the changes they made, its features, interface and see how it can be of use to you.

THE BEGINNINGS

The interesting thing about TeamSupport is that it works in B2B, a niche space for support software.

According to Eric Harrington, a co-founder, their background has a lot to do with this.  Before founding TeamSupport, the company’s founders ran a successful software company in the broadcast industry.

Harrington says the experience led to the discovery that most B2B companies functioned in silos. The founders started the company primarily to plug this drawback. “We ended up scratching our own itch after a failed search to find something off the shelf that understood the importance of a team concept,” says Harrington. They came up with the idea of “collaborative support” and wrote a tool that later transformed into TeamSupport.

According to Harrington, the solution’s ability to collaborate, provide a 360 degree of customers and client companies and asset inventory management capability sets the solution apart from other, similar solutions in the market.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SPECIFICS

TeamSupport is a two-in-one solution that combines support with collaboration.

This means that your support staff can use the solution to collaborate with each other and with their clients to resolve tickets. The ticket generation process is automated and requires two simple clicks. However, TeamSupport’s real value is best experienced after the ticket has been generated and is in the system.

In an earlier interview, Harrington had stated that they (the solution’s founders) had created the software with the idea that solving problems is best handled by a team. Based on available features, Harrington’s idea of team is a pretty broad one. For example, you can log public actions with tickets immediately after they are raised. What’s more customers have visibility into the public ticket resolution (and associated action) process. Thus, in this case, the team is a combination of support staff and customers.  Of course not all conversations on a ticket are public for customer viewing, and TeamSupport allows for both public and private actions.  This allows the internal teams to maintain group collaboration, and keep things private when appropriate.

I thought this was a great way to provide transparency and visibility into the ticket resolution process for both the business and the customer. The direct benefit, of course, is quicker ticket resolution. The indirect benefit is transparency and better communication with your customer, enabling you to remain on the same page as the customer.

WHAT’S NEW AND HOW YOU CAN SAVE TIME

Since our last review, the solution has added several new features. Most of them are focused on saving time for essential tasks.

Tickets generation workflow

To start with, you can automate several ticket generation tasks. Thus, you can establish automated workflows for the ticket generation process. Specifically, this means that you can decide ticket response, escalation and transfer rules, thus streamlining the ticket generation process.

Automate processes

Additionally, a powerful automation engine has been added.  TeamSupport users can establish detailed rules governing ticket response, escalation, transfer within the organization, and a wide range of other essential functions.

More integrations available

The company has also begun integrating extensive third-party software. Among the new third-party integrations are Batchbook, Mailchimp, Zoho CRM & Zoho Reports. In addition to extending their reach across vendors, the integrations also prevent the data silo effect referred to earlier and helps businesses use their best of breed solutions.

The company’s integration with Zoho Reports is very exciting to me. You can filter, sort, view and analyze support data using Zoho Reports. I especially like the fact that TeamSupport automatically updates Zoho Reports with latest data from TeamSupport including ticket data, portal logins, chat requests, and knowledge base traffic in real time. This means that you get information about your helpdesk performance in real time. In addition, licenses – based on database size – are available directly through Zoho, and in most cases will cost nothing at all under Zoho’s free Reports plan.

Ticket deflection

Another interesting and new feature in TeamSupport is ticket deflection. It works by proposing solutions to a customer problem during the ticket generation process. “It’s great to offer a form for your customer to fill out and wait for an answer, but it’s the waiting part that can be irritating,” says Harrington. So, TeamSupport aligns previously answered support tickets to the knowledge base, while a customer fills out the support request. Of course, the end result is that your customers and support staff save valuable time and enhance productivity.  Being able to give the customer an answer right now should make them very happy.

Screen recording

Another time saver is the recently introduced screen recording capability. This feature enables customers to record their screens and embed it with their tickets. The interesting thing is that this feature can be enabled at the flip of a switch er…button. Your support staff can replay the video from within the ticket and see/hear exactly what the customer issue is. I see this as another time saving tool that helps put a stop to the dreaded “back-and-forth” with the customer.

Mobile support

This year also brings mobile to TeamSupport. Agents and staff can login into their accounts directly from their mobile device where they can view/edit tickets and look up customers.  For teams on the go, this is a great way to stay in touch while away from the support desk.

Reminders

Keeping with the time-saving theme of features, TeamSupport also added a reminder feature, where agents can add reminders to tickets, companies or contacts with a mouse click. Reminders may be defined to alert staff about a customer warranty contract, or a follow up to a specific person about a discussion that was left open.

Wiki and water cooler

The solution also has a wiki and water cooler. While the wiki enables team members to share internal documents with each other, the water cooler is a collaboration tool that enables team members to chat and send messages to each other.

Although the company already integrates with Facebook, Harrington says the company has aggressive social plans. “We’ve tried to coin the phrase “Internal social” because our tool puts a large focus on team collaboration,” he says. “We believe by starting with the focus on the internal social aspect and helping our customers be more transparent among their internal teams, we will be in a much better position than most other vendors to help a B2B transition to the external social field.”

THE BASICS: WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE

The interface looks great. In fact, the company’s user-facing portal has been completely redesigned to enhance customer experience for first-time visitors and frequent visitors.

A left hand side panel enables global navigation. The top panel, which is a tabbed interface, shows appropriate menu options for your selection. The interesting part about the interface is that it is completely customizable. Thus, you can choose and pick your interface settings and customize it based on your preferences.

SUPPORTING YOUR SYSTEM

Needless to add, you cannot go very wrong with support with support software. Apart from comprehensive knowledge base documentation, the solution also has a customer portal login that enables you to track tickets and interact with support staff. In addition, you can also chat with support staff 24X7. Harrington says they are finishing up on a community forum. The forum, which will be called Community, will further enhance the customer portal, according to Harrington.

IS IT FOR YOU?

If you value speed and customization in your support software, then TeamSupport is definitely for you. Harrington says 2012 will be an exciting year for them. In addition to integrating the screen recording feature from the portal to the TeamSupport app, the company plans to make customer exchange more interactive and social. I can’t wait!

Ratings: overall rating 4/5, ease of use 4/5, features 4/5, value 3.5/5 and ease of deployment 4/5

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A month ago I set up a quick poll in the largest Software as a Service (aka SaaS) LinkedIn group to ask industry exerts their opinions about which SaaS product category would see the most growth in 2012.

170 answers and 36 comments later, it is time to share the results of this poll on the GetApp.com blog.

Social CRM is a clear winner

The number of options in LinkedIn’s polls are limited to five.

So I chose to include the following five categories simply based on their popularity with users of the SaaS marketplace GetApp.com:

Online CRM Apps

Marketing Automation Software

Online Collaboration Software

Online Project Management Software

Online Accounting Software

Here are the results of the poll:

CRM and Social CRM is seen as a fast growth category in 2012 ahead of collaboration tools.

It is interesting to dig into the comments to add some color to these results.

Technical SaaS will be hot in 2012

“You should also include technical offerings such as application performance management or Security as a service.” Ed Colonna at nCircle

” The biggest category is missing: technical SaaS offerings that augment and power otherwise on premise old fashioned installable software. This is a section growing the most next year. ISVs will learn to leverage the storage, DB or backup services the most. Later on they will learn to use cloud compute services for CPU heavy work as well” Stephan Haux  at Netbiscuits

And so will be SaaS solutions with mobile and social features

“I have being impressed with Productivity, Collaboration and project management solutions that provide Social Features in the last couple of years. With little marketing investment they have shown double digit growth during 2010 and 2011. I think next year will be a water shed year for this type of SM solutions” Manuel Ramirez

“I think it’s going to be the Service & Mobility aspect of CRM. It’s all about mobility creating an easier purchasing platform.” Michael Lipschutz at K2 Partnering Solutions

With SaaS HCM and eCommerce also looking promising

“You missed the BIG one. 2012 is the year of Human Capital Management SaaS Cloud Apps. This was made apparent with SAP/SuccessFactors and Salesforce/Rypple recent acquisitions. HCM has been exploding and we are seeing the effects rippling in the HCM SaaS waters here at our office with the increased demand for small and medium (and larger) business looking for a true Global HR Core Record of System in an integrated suite. The knowledge is out there and even the smallest shops are savvy and looking for HCM SaaS.” Patrick McGuire at Vana Workforce

“I’ll add another category which (in my mind) will have a very significant growth: SaaS-based eCommerce solutions. There are a few providers that cover the low end (such as Yahoo Stores, Volusion…) and the high-end (Demandware, NetSuite, Marketlive…) – however the introduction of MagentoGo will have an outstanding impact (in my mind). Magento claims to have over 20,000 Go stores in just a few months… This can be a paradigm shift in the eCommerce world (especially, now, that Magento was acquired by eBay…)” Itai Bass at Celebros

What do you think?

In your opinion what SaaS product category will see the most growth in 2012?

You can use the comments section below to drop your comments.