IncTechnology.com > Web-Based Apps

Browser Wars: Does IE8 Change the Game?

Marc Saltzman — 2009-10-28T10:26:07-05:00

Built into Windows 7 or available as a free download for other operating systems, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) offers a number of improvements and new features to go up against the likes of competing browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

IE8 delivers Internet users stepped up security against cross-site scripting attacks, downloads of malicious code, phishing, and other security risks. At the same time, the new browsing platform provides businesses with tools to centrally manage and configure group policies for the office, streamlined browser management, built-in developer tools to help save your developers time, and backwards compatibility with the earlier browser version, IE7.

The question for businesses now is whether IE8 is a game-changer in the battle of the browsers and whether your organization should standardize on IE8 -- or any of its well-regarded rivals.

Browsing issues to consider

There are several ways small and mid-sized businesses use Web browsers. Employees often use browsers to look for information about customers, competitors, or products on the Internet. At the same time, a growing number of companies are using and/or developing Web applications that need to be compatible with Web browsers.

Deciding which browser is best for a small business "is like asking an Italian and a Frenchman which country has the best food," jokes Steve Hilton, vice president of small and mid-sized business research at the Boston-based Yankee Group.

The advice may depend on which computing platform your business uses, PC-based or Mac. "My advice for picking a browser is simple: Internet Explorer 8 is your default, but if you feel like experimenting consider Firefox or Chrome and you might find one particularly appealing from a user-interface point-of-view," says Hilton. This isn't the case for a Mac user, though, he adds. "Apple-heads should just stick with Safari."

So, does it really matter which browser you go with? Not really, say some experts. "For most companies it's the path of least resistance, so whatever is the default on the operating system -- Internet Explorer for Windows or Safari for the Mac OS -- is the first one to try," advises Michael Gartenberg, vice president at Interpret LLC, a market research firm based in New York and Los Angeles.

The launch of IE8 provides businesses with a safe bet for standardization -- sort of. "At the end of the day, you won't have an issue if you go with IE8 as it's secure and stable," Gartenberg says. "Microsoft has done an excellent job to move the product forward over the years, but honestly, any modern browser is going to work pretty well for you."

That said, Gartenberg says Microsoft's dominance of market share in the browser space means some applications might favor IE8 over others in the compatibility department.

A company involved in writing Web apps should also take a browser-agnostic approach, both Hilton and Gartenberg say. "Web builders need to optimize sites for all of these browsers, but at least make sure IE and Firefox work, and then pick-up the Apple-centric products," Hilton advises.

"If you're writing Web-compliant apps, you shouldn't play favorites," adds Gartenberg.

Windows 7's relevance

Gartenberg says IE8, which is bundled in every copy of Windows 7, gives Microsoft a "home court advantage" in the browser wars. But it's not without merit: "IE8 does work better in Windows 7, so the combo helps Microsoft -- and ultimately, its users, too."

But that doesn't mean there isn't room for competition. "While I have not tested all browser and operating system combinations, I can't imagine Microsoft would do anything intentional to impede the use of competing browsers in Window 7," says Hilton.

Referencing antitrust issues, Hilton adds "surely Microsoft, and their legal department, would follow that old adage, 'once bitten, twice shy,' when it comes to their operating system and browser issues."

Quick pros and cons

While some technology analysts take laissez faire approach to deciding which browser is best for your business, there are still some advantages and shortcomings to each of the big players. Here they are:

Internet Explorer 8

Pros: Most websites and plugs-ins work well with IE. Faster speeds and handy time-saving tools. Compatibility View helps see older websites easier. Available in multiple languages. Built into Windows.
Cons: Security holes still found. Market share leader means more susceptible to attacks. Some crashing.

Mozilla Firefox

Pros: Newest version is roughly three times faster than Firefox 3.0. Tabbed browsing works well. Convenient features, including location-aware browsing. Vibrant and passionate development community.
Cons: Some bugs and security issues that requires "patching."

Opera

Pros: Lean and fast. Secure. Mouse gestures and other extra features in Opera (including Opera Unite) are handy additions.
Cons: Doesn't fare as well on heavy multimedia sites. Not as much plug-in support than IE and Firefox.

Apple Safari

Pros: Good looking. Fast. Reliable. Minimalist design.
Cons: Close button on left side. Not much mouse functionality (e.g. middle button). No status bar. Not all plug-ins supported. Built into Macs.

Google Chrome

Pros: Clean and fast. Some nice features like shortcuts. Available in 50 languages.
Cons: Lack of add-ons; not all websites/plug-ins are supported. No support for Macs.

Discovering Your Advantage with CRM

Mike Gorsage — 2009-10-21T17:00:10-05:00

You’ve heard the expression, “the customer is king.” In today’s economy, the customer is key to your future success. The right customer relationship management (CRM) strategies can give you insights that lead to increased revenue, improved earnings and solid competitive advantage.

Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Whether happy or unhappy, your customers are a vital, often underutilized source of business intelligence. Companies that take the time to understand their customers are better able to anticipate and respond to their needs. They also gain a distinct advantage over their competitors.

At this stage of the recession, many companies have lost sight of the competition, focusing instead on cutting costs and improving efficiencies. And they have succeeded; in fact, today’s companies are leaner and meaner than ever before. But now is the time to look outward – focusing on better CRM to grow top line revenues, improve earnings, and take market share away from the competition.

Know your customers and reap rewards

The key is capturing the right information about your customers. With effective CRM processes and technology, you can build a single “book of truth” about each customer. It’s a data warehouse that chronicles each customer’s history, including the products they typically buy, how often they buy, as well as their individual preferences and any problems they have had in the past. CRM delivers instant, company-wide access to valuable customer profiles and gives you the insight you need to turn this data into actionable information.

With a detailed customer history, you can easily segment customers, identifying which are your best customers and why. Is it their margins? Or is it their consistency of buying particular products and services? Linking your data warehouse or business intelligence system to your CRM process and technology can help you answer questions like these and gain an enriched insight that allows you to know how and when to focus on particular customers.

Profitable communication

Consider, for example, a customer who prefers doing business with your company over the Internet. If you don’t know that information, you may unnecessarily redouble your sales efforts by having a direct sales person call on that client. Had you known the customer’s preference, you could have eliminated the effort and cost of a direct sale and freed up your direct sales force to focus on generating new clients.

CRM is a great way to streamline and optimize your sales force. The information you gather in various systems can show you where to focus your efforts, directing your sales force to certain sets of clients. When implemented properly your CRM system will enable you to be more successful in attracting new customers, responding to new leads and closing deals more quickly. By improving your responsiveness to customers you also build loyalty and decrease customer "churn."

At the same time, you can identify the best ways to cross-sell and up sell to each customer, either through direct sales, telemarketing, Web marketing, or other sales or marketing activities. If your goal is to better enable your website for e-business activity, CRM is the ideal approach. It establishes a single point of contact with your company and enables you to capture vital customer information and put it into various applications. The result is a cost-effective and efficient way to communicate with and learn from your customers.

Creating your system

Practicing CRM does require discipline in the form of a more efficient and integrated internal business system. When it comes to developing a CRM system, it is important to remember that this is an “outside-in” approach that focuses on customer input. The most critical component is spending time with customers, learning what they find most valuable about doing business with you. By doing that, you are essentially identifying your main competitive advantages. From there you can design your processes and the supporting systems that will capitalize on that competitive advantage.

As with most IT initiatives, there is a wide variety of CRM hardware and software available from major vendors like SAP and Oracle. When choosing your CRM system, be sure to couple it with business intelligence capabilities that allow you to capture data in a variety of areas and organize it into a single book of truth about that customer. As you put that information into your CRM software in the right fields and capture all the types of transactions you do with clients, you now become very effective in the way to interact with them.

Keep in mind that CRM can only work to your advantage if you view as more than just a tool for getting more from your customers. It helps you do more for your customers. When you become more responsive to customers and understand the way they want to do business with you, you give your organization a head start over the competition and prepare for the impending recovery.

Mike Gorsage is a Partner and Leader of the Business Operations and Technology Practice for Tatum LLC. Tatum is the nation’s largest executive services firm, providing financial and technology leadership nationwide.

Tech Talk: Travel Agency Trains Staff Online

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-09-28T14:36:07-05:00

Grand Circle Travel, a Boston-based travel chain, has 30 regional offices around the world and 400 employees. The firm sells pre-packaged tours around the world to mature Americans. The company saved time and money and increased productivity by switching to online presentation software to train call center employees about new tours, replacing face-to-face training sessions, John Utter, performance coach and trainer for the call center tells IncTechnology.com

Elizabeth Wasserman: When did your company realize that the use of the Internet could help cut costs?

John Utter: With the advent of a new CEO, we've really made a push into Web technology and significantly upgraded our website. Mostly, it's quite the informational tool for us. We have approximately 120 different types of trips worldwide. Some of those destinations have three or four departures per week. We've made a huge investment into the Web portion of our business. We also hired a senior vice president who had experience using Brainshark in a previous job. He brought it on board. Think of it as a voice over PowerPoint delivered over the Web. One of the huge powers is that it does backend reporting. It's not just a narrated PowerPoint that lives online. The beauty is all the reporting applications to us so that we can use it for product knowledge to get our call center employees up to speed on all the trips we offer. We can do it in an on-demand fashion.

Wasserman: How does it work?

Utter: Normally what would happen is we would pull these employees together and have 15 or 20 associates sit in a classroom for 20 minutes or 30 minutes for presentations and then go back on the phone. Now what happens is it's all done on demand. They have a library of available sessions or modules or presentations that they can do before work, after work, at home, or in between calls. Missing calls is a huge issue in our business. If the average reservation is a $4,000-$6,000 sales opportunity then missing a call is a missed opportunity.

We're able to squeeze that in now in between calls and that means we don't miss those opportunities. If all of a sudden the call volumes slow down, we can have a bunch of people educating themselves about the products. We're now using it for a variety of marketing purposes as well. We have a group sales division because a lot of groups go with our travel packages. We just finished a presentation to go out to 2,000 retirement communities to solicit their business, as well.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Utter: In the first week of August, the year-to-date result from January to the end of July was that we dropped $473,000 from the bottom line. Our 200 call center associates received 855 hours of training online on-demand. Not once did they have to be pulled off the phone into a group meeting. We figured we saved 266 reservations in that 855 hours of call time and also gained a half customer service employee based on all the calls saved.

Wasserman: What type of reporting can you gather?

Utter: In terms of product training modules, we can test associates in terms of product knowledge. They are required to get 100 percent. We ask eight to 12 questions to validate their learning and it's pretty much a pass or fail system. When we send a presentation out to the public, we can track who opened it and how long they spent on it, and the retention rate for every single slide. It's an extremely powerful tool.

Traditional CRM vs. Social CRM

Brent Leary — 2009-06-04T13:57:31-05:00

Connecting with potential customers is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses today. A recent study by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland shows that marketing/innovation is the single biggest competitive disadvantage confronting small business, after access to capital. In fact, converting marketing leads into buyers and finding efficient ways to promote and advertise, are two areas small businesses say they struggle the most with. This finding is supported by a recent Microsoft small business study, which found customer acquisition and retention to be the biggest challenges facing their small business partners.

To help overcome customer acquisition challenges, many small businesses are looking into customer relationship management (CRM) tools and strategies. In the past, many viewed CRM as being too complex and expensive to implement for the expected return on investment. But over the last couple of years, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and a host of others have allowed companies of all sizes to implement CRM products and services at a fraction of the cost, time and effort needed in the past.

Traditionally, CRM’s strong suit has been improved operational effectiveness, easier access to information, and improved interdepartmental collaboration. While these are critically important to the success of any business, the focal point of these areas are internal to the company. And while a more efficient company should have a positive impact on customer interaction and responsiveness, does it really help us to meaningfully connect with those potential customers empowered in a Web 2.0 world?

Social media adds this missing dimension to the traditional, operational areas of CRM. And according to a recent Nielsen Company study, two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visited a social networking site or blogging site -- what they refer to as "member communities." The integration of social media into CR strategy -- called Social CRM -- differs in focus from traditional customer relationship management in a few key ways.

Data-driven vs. content-driven

Businesses began investing in CRM applications in the ‘90s mainly to store contact data. Before contact management software was available, businesses had to store their valuable customer information in Rolodexes, spreadsheets, and even filing cabinets. It was important to have a central location to store the data that was also easily accessible to communicate effectively with contacts. And with multiple people “touching” the customer for various reasons, it quickly became important to be able to track activities, appointments, potential deals, notes, and other information. Consequently, traditional CRM grew out of this need to store, track, and report on critical information about customers and prospects.

Social CRM is growing out of a completely different need -- the need to attract the attention of those using the Internet to find answers to business challenges they are trying to overcome. And nothing captivates the attention of searchers like relevant, compelling content. Having the right content, and enough of it, will help connect you with those needing your product or service. Creating content in formats that make it easy for your target audience to consume it increases the probability that you will move them to action -- starting a conversation with you. Whether it be by developing a blog post, podcast, YouTube video, or Webinar, creating attractive content is a key pillar of social CRM strategy.

Process-centric vs. conversation-centric

Traditional customer relationship management is heavily focused on implementing and automating processes. Companies looking to implement processes like lead and activity management would turn to CRM. Management would turn to CRM to standardize on sales processes to increase the accuracy of sales forecasts. And customer service requests could be tracked, routed, escalated, and resolved in a uniform fashion to ensure proper handling. Traditional CRM helped make it possible to ensure the proper activities and tasks would be performed by the appropriate people, in the correct sequences.

While there are processes involved in building a successful social CRM strategy, conversations are at the heart of it. Having meaningful conversations with those searching for the help you can provide is the turning point in transforming clicks into customers. The processes involved are aimed at making it easy for people to find us (through our content) and invite us into a conversation -- on their terms. This may take the form of a comment left on a blog post, following your company on Twitter, or possibly embedding your PowerPoint presentation on their webpage. There are numerous ways to participate in meaningful conversations with people looking for help in solving challenges. Formalizing a strategy to increase the likelihood of engaging in these conversations is a tenant of social CRM.

Operationally-focused vs. people/community-focused

As mentioned above, managing customer information is a major concern to businesses of all sizes. It plays a key role in the ability of businesses to respond to customer requests, manage resources needed to close deals efficiently, and provide management with reports to keep track of sales performance. This helps executives achieve operational effectiveness, and is particularly important for businesses expanding their sales and marketing operations, needing to implement new processes to manage growth. Businesses have typically turned to CRM to improve communication between sales and marketing operations, as well as to improve data-access to positively impact decision making.

Whereas traditional CRM activity focused heavily on operational effectiveness and its impact -- both internally and on the customer -- social CRM is all about people and community. It’s about how your company intends to participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the industry. How you embrace non-traditional influential people like popular industry bloggers, and social sites on the Web frequented by your audience. And fully understanding the importance of contributing to discussions, in a transparent manner, will help you build the kind of reputation needed to become a valued member of the online communities important to your business.

So if you’re turning to CRM to help bring on new customers, you’ll have to go beyond traditional CRM focuses by integrating social media infused tactics and strategies. But it’s important to remember social CRM is not a substitute, but a much needed complement to traditional areas of customer relationship management. It gets us close to what we’ve needed all along.

Brent Leary is a small-business technology analyst, adviser, and award-winning blogger. He is the co-author of Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business. His blog can be found at http://brentleary.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/brentleary.

Tech Talk: Payments Firm Tries Cloud Computing

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-05-26T15:18:51-05:00

Clearent, a secure payment processor based in St. Louis. Mo., launched in 2005 and needed a technology platform that could help the company grow rapidly to take on larger and more established competitors. Mark Peck, senior vice president of technical operations, tells IncTechnology.com that cloud computing helped give the start-up a rock solid IT foundation.

Elizabeth Wasserman: What were you looking for in a new IT platform?

Mark Peck: As we were getting the company started in 2005, we were looking for a technology solution that would help us grow quickly and build a solution and begin to deliver value in a small space of time. We felt we needed to have a very rock solid base layer for scalability and performance right out of the gate to handle the underlying management challenges.

Wasserman: You weren't replacing older technology…

Peck: We built a cloud computing platform from day one. We felt that was a key strategic advantage for us to be able to take advantage of the latest in cloud computing to be able to be competitive with much larger companies. We were able to achieve a lot of those economies of scale very rapidly.

Wasserman: What was it about the nature of your business that lent itself to cloud computing?

Peck: There are two main pieces of the transaction processing for merchants. There is the minute-by-minute authorization of transactions all throughout the business. And then there is process of taking all those transactions and making sure they get processed properly, fees are deducted, and make sure the accounting is proper. In addition, there is a reporting and business analytics component. Our merchants range from small Mom-and-Pop shops all the way to the largest firms you would recognize. They have a mix of locations where credit cards are swiped at point of sale, accepted over the Internet, or taken for mail orders or phone orders. They must have absolute confidence that every transaction -- whether they only process a few per day or millions per day -- is performed reliability and is funded correctly and on time and done in a secure manner so that there is no loss of card holder data or merchant data.

Wasserman: What platform did you decide to go with?

Peck: We decided that cloud computing would help us with secure scalability, and reliability, and hook into third-party software packages that would enable us to write our own software. That became the foundation on which we built the business. We chose the Appistry CloudIQ Engine because we felt it could solve these problems in a high scale transactional environment. We saw a logical fit for what we wanted to do and we spent time with the engineering staff and conducted a high performance proof of concept that helped convince us that this software would meet our needs.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Peck: Outstanding. You always know how good your infrastructure is by how little time you spend thinking about it. We've been really focused on business and solving business problems at the risk of taking it for grant. One of the things about the industry is when we came into this space there were a small number of very large competitors, mostly running applications written several decades ago for merchant electronic payment processing. They certainly had the scale and ability to run millions of transactions but we were able to offer additional services, such as an intuitive and graphical interface, user screens for merchants, intuitive reporting to help people understand their business. We are constantly being told whether by our sales team, our partners, or our customers, that we are offering things that no one else is offering.

Cloud Computing: Freedom to Be Productive

Andrea Peiro — 2009-03-13T10:53:59-05:00

Technology is one of the fundamental reasons why today’s small businesses can break through with innovative products, compete head to head with large corporations, and even change the very rules of the game. The modern paradigm of entrepreneurship -- fueled by inexpensive and available technology -- emphasizes flexibility, responsiveness, and cost effectiveness, enabling small businesses to contend for market position in a way that was not even thinkable just a few years ago.

Software provided as a service via the Web -- or in the "cloud" -- is the quintessence of what small businesses need for their information workers: cost effective, flexible tools that free them from physical dependency and allow for location independent operation and wide scale collaboration.

The most common tasks performed by small business employees are definitely related to basic office communications and productivity. Such tasks can now be performed through and incredible array of choices that leverage the software in the cloud model and take advantage of the inherent collaborative nature of the Internet for very low cost, or even for free, offering strong alternatives to traditional desktop computing.

E-mail, communications, and personal information management

Web mail has been available for many years, but in the recent past has become a complete alternative to traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed in fact for such tools to offer very rich and complete user experience.

Gmail is an appealing solution with its widespread adoption among consumers, more storage than you’ll ever need, full integration with traditional clients, and the unbeatable price -- it's free. Its true power though becomes evident when used in conjunction with the other Google applications, such as calendaring, contacts management, instant messaging, Google Docs and Google Sites. A premium, paid option called Google Apps integrates all these applications around your own domain name and allows for true workgroup functionality, plus extensive customer support for $50/year per user.

Microsoft’s Hotmail has been around for as long as I can remember, but in the last few years it has turned into a communication platform actually usable by a small business with success. Now part of Office Live Small Business, it integrates with services such as online storage and your own website. Starts for free and you can add services for tiered fees.

The best e-mail based tools though are the ones that allow you to get the best of all worlds: Web mail and client-side e-mail download and fully synchronized, together with online and offline calendars, contacts, tasks, and workgroup-level collaboration. In this domain, Yahoo!’s Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange can now be purchased as online services with absolutely no technical knowledge required for setup. They're both fantastic tools, but outsourced MS Exchange services are definitely the most mature and available. The domestic leader in the Exchange as a service offer for small businesses is Intermedia with robust and reliable hosting, full customer support starting at about $10/month per user. Less expensive, but more consumer oriented providers include 1&1 and mail2web that include a free Web-only service with no workgroup features.

Office productivity suites

In the past few years a new breed of online applications that perform most of the tasks that we are accustomed to perform with Microsoft Office have reached business maturity and are getting ready for prime time.

The one that I find to be the most reliable and well featured online alternative to Office is ThinkFree. It has been around for many years now and it offers both a Web-based office application and an identical companion for the desktop that requires no connectivity. The Web offerings are rounded by documents storage services, great workspace collaboration, and smartphones integration. Basic service is free; premium services and products can be added for modest fees.

Google Docs is clearly becoming a strong contender. Free, well integrated with its other services, it provides extremely simple interface with native collaborative features: multiple users can concurrently work on the same documents with no chance for confusion. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles though. It's a solid, collaborative office suite at no cost with essential features.

A recent entry in the Web productivity market that has made very good inroads is Zoho. While its services go well beyond the basic productivity suite and extend into teleconferencing, project management, e-mail, and customer relationship management (CRM) and are accessible mostly for free, their products are not exactly ready for robust applications yet, but they are certainly moving in the right direction. Definitely worth take a look.

A number of other Web-based applications designed to make small business more collaborative and flexible are finally reaching maturity. Some examples include file transfer (YouSendIt), intranets and collaboration (HyperOffice, Web Office), and project collaboration and management (Central Desktop and Basecamp.)

With the emergence of more and more applications leveraging the low development and distribution costs afforded by the software-as-a-service model (SaaS), small businesses are going to see a growing number of offerings tailored to their needs and responding to their functional requirements much better than what is available today on desktop software.

In my next column,, we will explore options for Web-based accounting and financial management. Stay tuned.

Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.

Web Applications: The Coming Threats

Todd Wasserman — 2009-01-27T10:12:41-05:00

If you’re looking for a secure form of computing, you can certainly do a lot worse than software-as-a-service (SaaS), but like any technology, SaaS is far from 100 percent secure.

SaaS, a remotely operated form of computing offered by the likes of Salesforce.com, nSite (part of SAP Business Objects), Qualys and others, is growing in popularity among small and mid-sized businesses, but still has fairly low penetration. A survey by Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass., of businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees in 2007 showed only 11 percent were using SaaS. “It’s starting to expand out and playing a much more crucial role,” says Liz Herbert, an analyst with Forrester.

The appeal to small business is obvious. Having software managed by a third party obviates in-house IT positions and places the onus on maintaining consistent uptime (99.7 percent seems to be the norm) on someone else. Moreover, security concerns are fewer than with in-house systems. “It hasn’t prevented people from signing up,” says Robert DeSisto, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, of Stamford, Conn., said regarding security. “I wouldn’t say it’s a big issue, but it’s an issue.”

Security concerns

The truth is, there are security gaps in any kind of technology. SaaS programs are vulnerable to the following threats:

Mass SQL bots, which compromised hundreds of thousands of websites.
The loss of data.
And the publishing of confidential data on the Internet.

Those are worst-case scenarios and not all that likely, but if you’re contemplating a contract with a SaaS vendor, Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, recommends hitting the prospective company with questions about their approach to secure computing.

First, Kandek suggests tackling the loss-of-data question. “You should ask, ‘If I lose data, how will you get it back to me?’” Kandek says. While most companies will back up information like CRM databases as a matter of course, a bigger issue is if such information is made available to the public or competitors somehow. Kandek deems it unlikely that a competitor would go so far as to hack a rival company to get such information. A more likely scenario is that the information is made available as collateral damage during a random hack or bug attack.

Questions to ask a provider

For the latter reason, Kandek advises that those who use Microsoft’s SQL Server especially to grill their potential SaaS provider about how often they update their software with patches provided by Microsoft and the like. “Patches could be important so you should ask when they do it, do they wait until the weekend or do it as soon as they can. That gives you a good idea of how diligent they are about it,” Kandek says. The issue doesn’t just apply to Microsoft. Even if you’re using a Linux-based system, there are patches issued on a regular basis that may be relevant.

Kandek says another question to pose is about data security. “You should ask, ‘How do you make sure it doesn’t go away,’” he says.

Meanwhile, Kandek says you can ask vendors for Web application codes for further reassurance, but you’re unlikely to get them. “That is usually considered proprietary and competitive information,” he says.

Another tip is to ask for a third-party security monitoring of the prospective firm. While there’s always the possibility that such results could be questionable (the monitoring firm could be in cahoots with the SaaS vendor), there are ways of checking the integrity of the third-party monitor. In the end, just as there is no 100 percent guarantee of security with any form of computing, there’s no way to be completely certain that your vendor is on the level, either. “You can be defrauded,” Kandek says. “It’s a trust relationship you have to build.”

Keep Your Head in the Cloud

Andrea Peiro — 2009-01-06T16:27:10-05:00

Throughout 2008, the concept of cloud computing has been at the edges of an incredible number of conversations, blogs, events, and reports. This coming year expect the hype to grow and the topic to be front and center across all facets of the IT industry: the change that this new approach to computing delivers will start to be truly felt not just in the space of consumer applications like social networking, chatting, or multiplayer gaming, but also across the business functions that impact your daily professional life.

Cloud computing includes all those IT usage models for which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for fulfilling the computing needs of the users, without requiring their knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. These IT models include Web 2.0, software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) -- the latter of which moves software platforms from the traditional ownership model into the cloud.

The upshot of cloud computing is that computing services are becoming more like utilities to a business.

Instead of purchasing a new server for your company, paying to have it installed and setup, and managing this server in house, you can simply rent the computing power you need, run your business applications, and only pay for the power you use. Like your business already does for electricity or water. No upfront investments, no hardware management, no troubleshooting. This option frees your company from the overhead of maintaining a complex IT infrastructure, but still provides you with the flexibility of running your own software -- such as a custom database for sales or a dedicated inventory management system that perfectly fits the needs of your business.

Software as a utility

That same utility model can be applied to software. Instead of owning a software application, you can just rent its functionality. That is exactly what you do when you use Google Mail, Facebook or LogMeIn. You are utilizing software provided to you as a service (SaaS), rather than having to install it on your computer. This “virtual software” is run in “virtual computers” that utilize the resources of clusters of real computers all working in perfect concert in the “Internet Cloud” and transparently and with zero overhead from the end user point of view. This approach, however, imposes limitations on how you can customize such software and integrate it with other applications, since you do not directly control it.

To obviate the customization issue there currently are two distinct approaches: the mashup and the PaaS.

Mashups are becoming very popular with the newest generation of Web 2.0 applications, where users can actually integrate SaaS from multiple vendors across the Internet and with little effort, such as opening a document stored in the Basecamp project management system directly with Zoho and from there sending it via e-mail using your Gmail account, with no need for multiple logins. This approach works if the SaaS products you want to integrate are developed according to rigorously established interoperability standards.

The PaaS approach consists of utilizing the customization and development tools provided by the SaaS vendor to leverage an established development platform and extend the functionality of its offering. Salesforce.com is the most popular example of such an approach. You can utilize their SaaS, extend it with a large library of third party add-ons, and customize it using their development tools to meet your specific needs. The technical skills needed though are substantially higher that what is required to use mashup techniques, but the level of customization possible is much higher.

No need for installation

In the practical world of small businesses, the most evident manifestations of cloud computing are the hundreds of software applications that are becoming accessible via the Web with no need for any local installation and available as free or paid services. The proliferation of these applications is providing small businesses with not only inexpensive alternative to traditional, costly software, such as office suites, accounting packages and customer relationships management, but also with a whole roster of useful products that fulfill very specific niche markets needs and would not normally make sense for vendors to develop as conventional software. Some examples are Zoho for office productivity, Freshbooks.com for accounting and Basecamp for project management.

Another example of cloud computing that is directly affecting small businesses can be found in all those business services that heavily rely on the Web to interface with customers, such as online banking, bill payment, hotel reservations, airlines tickets booking, and teleconferencing. These transactional services are all leveraging the Internet as a service conduit, independently from the computer the customer is utilizing to access them and make heavy use of cloud computing technologies. Examples in this category are Paytrust.com for bills payment and Paypal.com for credit card processing services.

A third area of significance in cloud computing applications is e-ommerce. Services that offer simple, end-to-end e-ommerce platforms that require little or no knowledge of Web design or programming to be setup -- such as Amazon WebStores or eBay Stores -- are becoming more popular and more sophisticated, giving small businesses the possibility to setup a professional e-commerce site in just a few days.

In the small business markets cloud computing is evolving into a truly disruptive technology, enabling low-cost computing, commoditized software, and low barriers to entry for more technology entrepreneurs to create the next generation of software services.

In my next column, I will review practical ways a small business can move its computing almost entirely to the cloud lowering costs, reducing its IT overhead, and increasing its flexibility and responsiveness. I will explain how to leverage the cloud for office productivity, collaboration, data security and storage, financial management, project management, and more. Stay tuned.

A Business Intelligence Software Primer

Michelle V. Rafter — 2008-12-18T20:35:17-05:00

Imagine all the information inside the spreadsheets, databases, and other software programs your company uses.

Now imagine there was a way to aggregate all the bits and bytes trapped in individual programs and run them through one giant filter that could spit out reports to help you run your business better -- information like which routes trucks should take to get there fast without wasting gas or which product lines should be expanded because they pull in the biggest net profit.

That’s a pretty good explanation of business intelligence software, programs that gather and analyze data from umpteen original sources and produce reports companies can use for strategic planning purposes in sales, staffing, supply chain management, product profitability, and other aspects of business.

Business intelligence (BI) applications were once the purview of major corporations that could afford the multi-million dollar price tags and the extensive IT systems they needed to run.

But BI software, like a lot of other applications -- is making its way to the Web, and a growing number of vendors offer it on a software-as-a-service basis at prices smaller companies can afford.

Why your business should use BI

Companies are looking to speed up the pace at which they do business and the kind of analytics BI software generates help them make decisions faster -- in hours or days compared with weeks or months, says Michael Lock, analyst with Aberdeen Group, the tech market researcher.

Unlike earlier generation BI applications that required companies to do a lot of custom programming and integration, SaaS-based BI software has templates and dashboards that make it simpler to, says Brad Peters, CEO of Birst (formerly known as Success Metrics), a Silicon Valley start up that introduced a SaaS-based BI app called Birst in the fall of 2008.

Small and mid-sized businesses are also interested in Web-based BI software because it takes a minimum of internal IT resources to get started. Vendors maintain the application and store customer data, all outside the firewall, Aberdeen’s Lock says. “It’s as close to a plug-and-play solution as you’re going to get.”

In fact, in a poll of 650 companies Aberdeen Group did in October 2008, 22 percent of companies under $50 million that used BI software opted for a SaaS solution compared with 15 percent of mid-sized companies and 8 or 9 percent of large enterprises.

SaaS-based BI software is also reasonably priced. Birst, for example, offers a trial version of its software for free and other versions start at $100 per user per month.

As more small and mid-sized companies show an interest in BI software, vendors are taking notice. In the past year, companies such as SAP and IBM that traditionally offered on-premise software for large enterprises have acquired smaller, SaaS-based BI software vendors to better compete in the small and mid-sized business market.

To get the maximum value out of BI software, however, it’s not enough to buy a license or pay a subscription fee. A company has to nurture an information culture so people get into the habit of using the software, because ultimately, the more users, the better the ROI, Lock says. He tells of one company, a building materials manufacturer, that was so successful using BI software for budgeting and forecasting that people from throughout the organization started asking how they could use it too. “They saw what it could do and started to get creative. It was culture driving adoption,” Lock says.

SIDEBAR: BI Software Vendors

In addition to Birst, Aberdeen Group identifies the following vendors that offer SaaS-based BI software:

Blink Logic

Cloud9 Analytics

Crystalreports.com - Web-based BI from Business Objects, a division of SAP

Microsoft Office Moves to the Web

Michelle V. Rafter — 2008-11-26T15:25:36-05:00

Microsoft Office, the backbone of many a small business, is getting an Internet makeover.

Starting with the next upgrade, Office, the popular office productivity suite including Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote will be available as individual Web-based applications that can be accessed using several types of browsers and just about any kind of computing devices that can log onto the Internet.

The upgrade is called Office Web Applications. Microsoft unveiled it at a developers’ conference in October and was expected to begin offering limited private technology previews before the end of 2008 before a beta release sometime in 2009. The company has not disclosed when the programs will be widely available.

The apps will be “lite” versions of standard Office programs that will be heavy on the features people want when they’re working on the Internet, such as the ability to share documents, says Chris Bryant, Microsoft’s Office group product manager.

The apps will let people create, edit and collaborate on documents through the browser. Apps will work with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. Microsoft is still testing the programs’ ability to work with Chrome, the new browser from Google, Bryant says.

Good news for small business

The changes come as Microsoft makes more of its business software available on the Internet, or “in the cloud” as it’s coming to be called. It’s about time, says Scott Kozicki, a contract CIO and long-time IT professional who lives in Nashville, Tenn. “Our lives have been completely transformed” by the Internet, Kozicki says. “Whether it’s cell phones, digital video recorders, or laptops, it’s everywhere. A lot of the thinking about storing data on a machine is rooted in the 70s version of the PC and we’re so far beyond that. I think this is Microsoft waking up to that concept.”

When it comes to Web-based apps, Microsoft is following competitors like Google, which acquired or created its own office productivity programs like Gmail

and Google Docs as Web apps from the get go and has gained a wide following as a result.

But Microsoft still owns the bulk of the office productivity software market. By the company’s own reckoning, between 500 million and 600 million people worldwide use Office, making it the most popular office productivity tool anywhere. According to a September poll by ReadWriteWeb, the technology news blog, 49 percent of 2,600 respondents use Microsoft Word as their main writing program compared with 16 percent who use OpenOffice, an open source word processing program, and 15 percent who use Google Docs.

Playing catch up with Google

Although Google has a head start in the Web apps department, the programs leave enough to be desired that Microsoft can catch up, says Ralph Barbagallo, a Valencia, Calif., game designer and Microsoft software user. “If Microsoft can release a good Web version of Office while it’s still the gold standard they have a shot,” Bargagallo says. “Of course, finding a way to make money from them is the challenge.”

Microsoft’s move to Web apps is significant for small businesses, especially companies that are too small to maintain much of an IT staff, says Bryant, the Office group product manager. “Microsoft’s software plus services strategy can help those people who are self-managing their IT because it’s partly off loading some of that burden to us,” he said. Web apps can also help small businesses by putting them on the same technological footing as bigger business partners. “You don’t necessarily have to know what version the person on the other end of the line is using” to collaborate, he says.

According to Bryant, the Office group product manager, business customers will buy Office Web apps through the same type of licensing agreements they use to purchase other Microsoft software. Individual consumers and solo entrepreneurs will be able to choose from some advertising-sponsored free apps and some subscription-based services, both of which will be offered through Microsoft’s Office Live portal.

Businesses that want to participate in the Office Web private technology preview can sign up at the Office Live Workspace.