I was reading the November 1 edition of Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine and I came across an insert from Profit Magazine that examined the roadblocks and rewards that attend entrepreneurial endeavour in Canada. It is an interesting read that is worth checking out. More specifically there was a section on technology that covered one of Indicee’s favourite topics – cloud computing. What makes cloud technology interesting is the economic benefit that businesses receive. Our goal at Indicee is to dramatically change the economics of business intelligence, making it accessible to the masses of business people that are living in manual process hell or they are making poor decisions based on gut feel.
Cost containment is one of the primary attractions of cloud computing. We’re seeing much higher propensity among small businesses to invest in cloud-based services…They see it as a panacea that allows them to get more functionality that doesn’t require up-front capital investment and staff to manage it on a monthly basis
You can read the entire Small Business Report on Profit’s website or I have included the Technology section by Ian Portsmouth below
The Canadian Small Business Report – Technology
Ask a dozen management mavens to identify the most disruptive force in business over the past 20 years, and you’re likely to hear only one answer: the Internet.
“On one hand, it creates the potential to do business with absolutely everyone out there,” says Becky Reuber, a professor of strategic management who specializes in entrepreneurship at the Toronto-based Rotman School of Management. “But on the other hand, it’s hard to do that. We don’t know a lot about how to do that. And the Internet changes all the time.”
Indeed, the Net gives every business a higher degree of access to prospective customers a mile or an ocean away. In the early days of e-commerce, countless stories were told about “accidental exporters” who’d never sold outside their local market before their website attracted an order from overseas. Today, such serendipitous sales are outnumbered by foreign competitors eating the local guy’s lunch.
“A lot of firms used to have four competitors in their local market,” says Reuber, “but because of the Internet, now they might have 400.” That makes online marketing a strategic imperative for most firms.
Therefore, says Reuber, the question is this: “How do you get people to know about you [online] in the way you want them to know about you?” She believes that smaller, founder-run businesses have a great opportunity to cut through the clutter with the “human branding” of the entrepreneur. “The really cogent stories aren’t just about the company and the brand, but have the entrepreneur wrapped up in them.” Broader PR efforts are also valuable. “By constructing stories that appeal not only to the media but to your various stakeholders,” says Reuber, “you can set up a lot of intangible barriers to entry.”
Ajay Agrawal, a professor of entrepreneurship at Rotman, sees massive disruptive power at the intersection of the Web and human capital in emerging markets. He marvels at oDesk.com, an online matchmaking service for the clients and providers of services such as translation and programming. Post a job requirement, and community members can bid on it. You might get one bid from Winnipeg for $24 an hour, and another from Mumbai for $4 an hour. But who’ll give you better bang for your buck? The system encourages customers to rate their supplier after every job. Over time, the Mumbai supplier might generate an approval rating equal to or better than his Winnipeg rival, at one-sixth the cost.
That the Web can give businesses access to a global pool of qualified, low-cost labour should intrigue enterprising businesspeople—and frighten anyone delivering undifferentiated services for which face-to-face contact is optional.
“In my view, it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” says Agrawal. “When that starts to happen, all bets are off, and it’s a wide-open opportunity for entrepreneurs.”
For instance, it could help busy firms cover short-term staffing gaps or cash-strapped outfits to acquire top-notch talent at bargain prices.
Still, most of the buzz in small-business technology surrounds cloud computing, primarily software (e.g., Google Apps) and infrastructure (e.g., storage and IT security) delivered over the Web. Thanks to cloud-based software, London, Ont.-based voice talent agency Voices.com employs just 12 people but manages more than 107,000 customer relationships with the voice actors represented by the firm and the clients who buy its services.
At the core of the operation is Salesforce.com, a popular Web-based customer relationship management system. As you’d expect, Voices.com uses Salesforce.com to store profiles of all its actors and clients; these profiles are robust and easily modified. “But the real value of Salesforce comes from the AppExchange, an online marketplace of applications that plug directly into your Salesforce suite,” says David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.com. “It’s as easy as adding an app to your Facebook page.”
One such plug-in integrates Google AdWords into Salesforce, allowing Ciccarelli to more easily track the effectiveness of his AdWords campaigns and such details as which ad creative a particular individual clicked on. “It allows you to have a more meaningful conversation with that prospect,” he says. Another app is Salesforce Ideas, which allows Voices.com staff to submit business-improvement suggestions that get posted online and subjected to a vote; later on, people can check to see which ideas were implemented.
You’ll also be hard pressed to find office-suite software in the Voices.com headquarters. Instead, staff use Google Docs for personal and shared documents. This set-up gives employees anytime, anywhere access to presentations and spreadsheets without remote-access software or VPN systems, allows for real-time collaboration and saves money. “Half of us don’t have [office-suite software], and I can’t think of a situation in which we’d need it,” says Ciccarelli. “We are much more about generating results than creating beautiful documents that end up sitting on a shelf.”
Cost containment is one of the primary attractions of cloud computing. “We’re seeing a much higher propensity among small businesses to invest in cloud-based services,” says Paul Edwards, Toronto-based director of SMB and channels research at market-research firm IDC Canada. “They see it as a panacea that allows them to get more functionality that doesn’t require up-front capital investment and staff to manage it on a monthly basis.”
After three years of operating in the cloud, Entripy Custom Clothing founder Jas Brar can’t imagine doing business any other way. Based in Oakville, Ont., his vertically integrated screen-printing and embroidery business uses NetSuite, a Web-based CRM and enteprise resource management system, in combination with custom applications built by in-house programmers. “It allows us to process five times as many orders with the same number of staff, and it increases the speed at which we do business,” says Brar.
In an industry typified by regional players, he adds, “[Entripy] can service British Columbia quicker than our competitors in Vancouver.” It also allows the firm to operate almost paperlessly. In a complete order cycle, from taking an order to packing it, shipping it, issuing an invoice and accepting payment, the company produces just one piece of paper: the shipping label that goes on the box. “Cloud computing is the future,” says Brar. “I could never go back.”
