Dell Extends its End-to-End Storage Story for SMBs

Storage is a key requirement for today’s small-to-medium business (SMB) and mid-market enterprises. As the amount of data multiplies, and the need to protect critical data grows, SMBs now require many of the same data storage capabilities as larger enterprises.

With these requirements in mind, Dell recently announced the acquisition of AppAssure–the company’s first acquisition since launching its new Software Group. AppAssure will be part of Dell’s enterprise storage and software line-up, and underscores Dell intent to extend its footprint in the storage solutions market. The acquisition helps Dell take another big step in its enterprise solutions strategy and deliver a Fluid Data architecture that automatically and intelligently optimizes and protects data everywhere.

AppAssure’s software solution, billed as next generation data protection, provides continuous backup protection across physical, virtual, and cloud-based storage environments and includes the following capabilities:

• Snapshot and replication
  
• Data de-duplication and compression
  
• Backup and restore
  
• Archiving
  

Market demand for this type of solution is reflected in AppAssure’s success to date. Since its launch in 2006, AppAssure has expanded to 230 employees and more than 6,000 customers worldwide, with 194% revenue growth year-over-year for 2011.

PERSPECTIVE

The top four technology challenges for the SMB and mid-market companies are (Figure 1):

• Containing technology related costs
  
• Implementing new solutions and upgrades
  
• Keeping my systems up and running
  
• Integrating different applications
  

Figure 1 SMB and Mid-market Top Technology Challenges

Source: SMB Group 2011 Small and Medium Business Routes to Market Study, November 2011

As the complexity of storage requirements rises, these challenges have become more pronounced in the storage space as SMBs have tried to piece together disparate solutions from multiple vendors to ensure data protection and business continuity/disaster recovery.

With AppAssure, Dell can provide SMBs with storage capabilities not only for their physical servers but across to virtual and cloud computing environments–which are increasingly the environment of choice for SMBs. Regardless of the data environment, AppAssure Backup and Replication provides backup/restore, archiving, and disaster recovery, simplifying administration with near instant, reliable data recovery. AppAssure also protects application software in both virtual and physical environments.

AppAssure is part of Dell’s broader “fluid data” architecture (Figure 2), which is designed to put the right data in the right place at the right time, at the right cost. It provides a unified storage architecture to manage data more cost-effectively and efficiently–thereby addressing the key technology challenges that SMBs face. At a high level, the Dell Fluid Data architecture can help SMBs manage the growing data avalanche in a more intelligent and streamlined way. In addition to the capabilities enabled by AppAssure, Dell’s storage architecture and solutions (Figure 2) address a broad range of storage management needs including:

• Ability of handle file, block and object-level data to support a variety of applications, from Microsoft Exchange to virtualization solutions to databases to social media applications.
  
• Automated support for multi-tier storage (primary, backup and archive data) to control rapidly escalating storage costs and compliance requirements.
  
• Automated data protection and replication, eliminating the need for daily manual intervention.
  
• Support for business continuity and disaster recovery.
  

Figure 2 Dell Unifying Storage Architecture


Source: Dell

Rapid data growth driven by new applications such as rich-media, social media, 64-bit architectures and compliance solutions requiring availability of data for very long time-periods is causing increases in storage system costs, storage infrastructure complexity, and power and cooling costs. Dell’s end-to-end storage management solutions help SMBs get some of these storage costs under control, for instance:

• Data reduction technologies such as data de-duplication and compression allow SMBs to control data growth rates by eliminating redundant data. This enables more efficient use of existing storage assets and helps users defer capital expenditures for new storage systems as they reduce disk capacity requirements. They also help decrease bandwidth requirements for data transfer.
  
• Tiered storage architectures allow users to control storage hardware costs based on business value and frequency of access. Higher performance, higher cost storage resources can be dedicated to mission critical initiatives, and lower performance and cost solutions can be allocated for back up and archiving.
  
• Storage virtualization helps address storage costs by improving resource utilization, data mobility, information availability and related IT resources required to manage storage environments.
  
• Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions reduce the impact of unexpected outages. By helping to keep the business up and running, they protect against potential revenue loss and brand damage due to outages.
  

QUICK TAKE

Dell’s acquisition of AppAssure and its continued focus on end-to-end storage management solutions provides several benefits to SMBs in addition to cost savings:

• Ability to manage a mixed environment of physical, virtual, and cloud-based storage in a unified storage management solution.
  
• Reduced IT resources needed for data storage management.
  
• Ease of doing business with a single vendor for an integrated storage management solution.
  
• Significant storage capacity savings afforded by storage consolidations and sophisticated deduplication/compression technologies.
  
• Support for the most widely adopted virtual solutions – Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, vSphere and Citrix XenServer.
  

And, with SMB market adoption of virtualization and cloud solutions rising, Dell’s timing couldn’t be better. The interest among SMBs to acquire/upgrade IT infrastructure management and virtualization solutions is very high (Figure 3), driven by the need to address IT environment complexity and increasing costs.

Figure 3 Solutions Purchased/Upgraded and Future Plans

Source: SMB Group 2011 Small and Medium Business Routes to Market Study, November 2011

That said, SMBs need better guidance in this area. Dell can significantly strengthen its story–and sales–by making it easier for the SMBs to easily understand the scope of it storage systems and end-to-end storage management offerings and pinpoint the “best-fit” solution(s) for their needs through the following:

• Compararative information and visuals on Dell’s web site-replacing pages of detailed information and specs that illustrate Dell solutions and provide guidance on when and why different systems are relevant
  
• Web-based tools for needs assesssment and recommendations.
  
• Proof points in the form of customer references, return-on-investement and total-cost-of-ownership calculations that illustrate the financial and efficiency benefits of Dell’s integrated approach.
  

By providing education to SMBs and clarifying its storage story, Dell can make the most out of its push to extend beyond the hardware business to provide business computing solutions that are innovative, yet practical–and geared to both SMBs as well as large enterprises.

What Can We Learn From This Year’s Holiday Season?

—by Brent Leary, CRM Essentials

In conjunction with IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the fourth post in the series.

Christmas 2011 is a great example of Smarter Commerce in action. It’s a lesson in why businesses need to transform the way they market and sell their products and services. According to the National Retail Federation, retail industry sales for the 2011 holiday season increased 4.1 percent year-over-year to $471.5 billion, beating its expectation of 3.8 percent growth. And while the overall numbers probably made for a pleasant holiday for the industry as a whole, what was happening online was astounding:

• US online holiday shopping season reaches a record $37.2 billion, up 15 Percent vs. 2010 – a rate of increase almost 4X higher than the overall rate for retail.
• A post-holiday 2011 retail study from Kabbage, Inc. focusing on small-to-medium online merchants found 69% of respondents reporting increased sales. On average, study participants experienced a 32% hike in sales compared to the 2010 season.
• As late as one week before Christmas 2011, one-quarter of consumers hadn’t even started holiday shopping. (Consumer Reports)
• 93% of retailers have offered free shipping at some point during the season vs. 85% last year. (USA Today)
• The 2011 US Holiday Season edition of the ForeSee Results E-Retail Satisfaction Index of the top forty Internet retailers increased by a point from 78 to 79 (on a scale of 1-100)
• Almost one in four retail searches online on Christmas Day were made using mobile phones or tablet devices, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
• The number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January, according to a new Pew Research study. (New York Times)

Technology’s Impact on Behavior Is Accelerating

The world is changing. While still a fraction of the overall sales figures, ecommerce is growing at a much faster rate than traditional retail. And not just for the big retailers. As the Kabbage study illustrates, small and midsize online retailers enjoyed tremendous growth as well. This in part stems from the effect technology is having on the customer buying process, and the ability of companies to adapt their business processes to support online shopping.

When you think about twenty-five percent of shoppers not starting their Christmas shopping until after December 18^th, it really hits home how the process of shopping has changed. Five to ten years ago most people still were going to multiple stores in search of ideas for things to buy, to find recommendations, compare items, and to look for deals, so they had to start their shopping efforts earlier. Now they can do most of that online – with a lot less time involved. And from the online retailer’s perspective, they leverage the latest technology not only to provide this information to online shoppers, but also to deliver the goods on time as well. Jewelry specialist Blue Nile offered free FedEx shipping guaranteed to arrive by Saturday, December 24, for all orders placed as late as 7 p.m. the day before (Friday, December 23). And other online retailers offered similar shipping capabilities.

This all adds up to shoppers more efficiently finding what they want, knowing the price they want to pay and having the confidence of getting it in time – with the added benefit of not having to wrestle with issues like parking, crowded malls, weather etc.. And as both companies and consumers accelerate their technology adoption, look for ecommerce to steadily increase its portion of the retail pie while customers leverage social and mobile to decrease the time and effort it takes to buy things.

Technology’s Impact on Behavior is Dramatically Affecting Expectations

One of the more interesting developments is how technology is impacting customer expectations as well as their behavior. Now that companies like Amazon can get items to us in two days for free, we expect this kind of service all the time. And while 93% of them did offer free shipping at some point during the holiday season, a study also showed 73% of consumers recently surveyed by MarketLive named “free returns” as a top promotion in determining their online purchasing behavior.

This is a great example of customers understanding what technology can do, and expecting vendors to find ways to leverage it to continuously improve their shopping experience. And improving the experience is crucial to keeping customers satisfied. According to the ForeSee study, satisfaction scores are important because a one-point change in website satisfaction can predict a 14% change in revenues generated on the web. And when they were highly satisfied with a purchase:

• 64% of survey responders said they were more likely to buy from the same company the next time they needed a similar product;
• 67% were more inclined to recommend the company to others; and
• 65% felt a sense of ‘brand commitment’.

This illustrates that investing in improving customers’ web experience is a terrific way to build brand loyalty and capture the benefits of viral marketing (or something like this).

A Christmas Carol…

You really don’t have to look much further than Christmas Day 2011 to see how technology has changed customer behaviors and expectations. Digital content & subscriptions (digital downloads of music, TV, movies, e-books and apps) accounted for more than 20 percent of sales on Christmas Day. On any other day of the holiday season, that number was only 2.8%. And these numbers were driven by the rise of mobile devices, with the iPad leading the way on Christmas Day with a staggering 7% of all online sales coming through just that one device – accounting for 50% of sales that day, according to the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark.

While the numbers tell the story, it really hits home personally when I saw my parents (both octogenarians) sitting at the kitchen table Christmas Day – my father with his iPad, and my mother with her Kindle Fire. And my mother, having received the Fire as a gift, was reading an ebook she purchased Christmas morning… with an Amazon gift card.

This is a totally different story of Christmas than Charles Dickens told in the 19^th century, but it’s a tale of what to expect in the 21^st century when it comes to customer engagement. Because of technology and its empowering effect on customers, they are developing “great expectations” their vendors must live up to. Which means vendors must be smarter in their approach to smarter, more informed customers.

This is the fourth of a six-part blog series by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. In our next post, we’ll look at key points to consider when planning a smarter commerce strategy. In our next post, we’ll look at IBM’s Smarter Commerce offerings to help illustrate how midsize companies can reshape the way they do business to meet the expectations and needs of smarter customers.

Relevance of Marketing Tools/Media in Customer Acquisition

The topic of lead generation and the role of various media solutions in the lead generation process draw significant conversation. From a survey of small businesses done in the summer of 2009 and detailed in my blog, ‘GoToMeeting‘ from CitrixOnline or ‘Intuit Website’ from Intuit. This form of media effectively cultivates and nurtures demand. ‘Small Businesses interest in Social Media Increasing ‘ and with regards to tools used by small businesses to promote their business (not generate sales leads), 77% of small businesses are using or plan to use social media tools. Why has the use of social media seen such a dramatic increase? This is primarily driven by several factors:   

• Change in the personal communication environment and habits of consumers and business workers  
• Low barriers to entry: the cost of participating in the social media communications are very low and some—tools like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and LinkedIn—are even free 
• Social media solutions are a one-to-many form of real-time communications
• Social media is much more than a digital form of viral marketing – it is an effective and inexpensive way to convert contacts into a referral network  

   

Traditional Media tools. On one end of the spectrum, marketing is responsible for Demand Generation by driving awareness. Traditional media tools such as radio, television, newspapers and business journals (in their print form), provide broadcast opportunities and are good for creating broad awareness to develop interest among consumers and businesses – otherwise known as Outbound Marketing. Successful examples include the TV commercials like ‘GoToMeeting’ from CitrixOnline or ‘Intuit Website’ from Intuit. This form of media effectively cultivates and nurtures demand.

New Media/Digital Media include Social Networking tools (Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), Webinars and Podcasts, and Search Engines. Such ‘inbound marketing’ tools enable businesses with product/service increase awareness already developed to a certain level through traditional tools to further draw in consumers and encourage their further investigation of the company’s product or service.  

An SMB survey from Citibank found that some small businesses saw little reason to hop onto the social-network bandwagon. The majority of them found sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to be of little help in finding new business leads. While social media can certainly provide channels to network and help a growing business flourish, many SMBs do not have the manpower or the time required to take advantage of them—that is, use them to look for business advice or information. It is up to the business to bring in the relevant social media conversations related to crowd-sourced recommendations for their company and solutions into their company website or other discussion forums. Techniques that do this are illustrated very well in the “Inbound Marketing” book by founders of HubSpot. 

Personal-touch Media tools like company website, e-mail marketing, live webinars, and professional advisors provide the information to convert exploring consumers and business buyers into potential leads. The new media-based inbound marketing solutions drive the explorers to the company website and/or additional personal touch based media and channels. However, SMBs must work to channel their company relevant social media discussions into their website. These social media conversations are similar to word-of-mouth and personal communication methods. Ultimately, these personal-touch media solutions are directly involved with actual lead generation, ongoing lead nurturing and finally conversion to customers as well as cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers continually deepening prospect relationships    

Some of the new marketing automation and lead nurturing solution companies like Marketo, HubSpot and Demandbase are combining some of the key aspects of New Media/communications and Personal-touch Media/communications solutions that provide great value to the SMB and mid-market companies for both outbound and inbound marketing – and most of these solutions can be implemented for a fraction of the cost of a marketing person.    

Mid-Market CPM Requirements and Vendor Selection Criteria

In today’s fast-paced and volatile business climate, midsize businesses need a clear vision, financial agility, and strong collaborative capabilities to drive better-informed and more strategic business decisions. Mergers, acquisitions, new business models, and increasing regulatory requirements heighten the importance of having accurate, flexible tools to support corporate forecasting, budgeting, reporting, scorecard and compliance functions.

Many midsize companies currently use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, email, shared folders, and other ad hoc tools for these tasks, but they are finding significant shortcomings with this approach. As a result, more businesses are evaluating CPM solutions as a way to get these jobs done faster, more efficiently, and more accurately.

However, while their financial and planning operations may be very complex, midsize companies are often constrained in terms of their budget, IT resources, and support. In addition to evaluating the features of different CPM solutions and how these solutions stack up in terms of meeting their functional requirements, decision makers need to consider several additional factors. Based on our recent in-depth discussions with several mid-market CFOs and CIOs that have evaluated, selected, and implemented CPM solutions in the last couple of years, here are our suggestions as to the key questions that midsize firms need to answer when evaluating CPM solutions:

• How quickly and easily can business users learn to use the solution? Easy to use solutions lead to faster, more widespread user adoption. Ideally, CPM solutions should have an interface with a familiar spreadsheet look and feel. You should be able to easily configure the interface and dashboards without help from IT or external consultants, and building models should be intuitive. In a midsize firm, you don’t want to have to rely on or wait for an IT department that’s probably stretched to thin to create and run reports. When users can easily create and run reports themselves, they get the key performance indicators (KPIs) and other information they need more quickly, speeding up and enhancing the decision-making process.
  
• What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the CPM solution? CPM solutions need to be affordable. They must take into account not only software costs but also any resources that you will need to design, implement, configure and manage these solutions (including annual maintenance fees), as well as the hardware you’ll need to run them on. You must also consider if you’d be better off with a subscription-based service that you can pay for monthly or annually without incurring any upfront capital costs. Many midmarket buyers are considering software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud-based CPM solutions that offer subscription-based pricing and eliminate the need for upfront capital investments. SaaS CPM makes it easy for companies to start small and expand use as their needs grow. Since SaaS CPM solutions are delivered over the Web, they don’t require on-premise infrastructure, or internal IT support or maintenance. As a result, you can deploy them more quickly and dramatically reduce TCO.
  
• Is the vendor’s pricing transparent? No one wants to start evaluating solutions and then get sticker shock because of hidden costs. Look for vendors that provide transparent pricing on their Websites, or at least, vendors that will give you a good ballpark estimate early on it the evaluation process.
• Do you want a focused, purpose-built CPM solution, or CPM as part of a broader business intelligence solution? Solutions designed specifically for corporate performance management (such as Adaptive Planning, Clarity, Prophix. Longview and others) are typically more cost-effective and fast to deploy than broader business intelligence suites, which often include a CPM component. However, broad based BI solutions, such as IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects, are beginning to carve out CPM specific modules and offerings that integrate with the broader suite. Consider what your short and long term requirements in deciding which route will best serve your firm’s needs.
  
• Can you try before you buy? Solutions that are easy to evaluate lower your risk—both from a time and monetary perspective. Can you get a true feel for the solution, with a functional trial version? If the finance department can try the solution with real data and see the results, it can speed the vendor selection and decision-making timeframe significantly.
  
• How long will it take to implement the solution? Most mid-market enterprises do not have months to spend deploying and getting productive with CPM. Talk to customers already using the solutions you are considering to get an accurate, realistic picture of how long it will take.
  
• How well does the solution meet your data security requirements? Security is a top concern for all companies, and in some industries, regulatory requirements also come into play when considering a CPM solution. In some cases, specific compliance constraints require companies to deploy on-premise solutions. However, in many cases, a quality SaaS provider can provide better, more secure and more reliable operations than an internal IT department. Ideally, look for a vendor that is SAS-70 compliant and can readily document the physical and virtual security measures that they use to safeguard your data.

The good news is that today, more CPM solutions are available that are specifically designed to meet mid-market requirements than in the recent past (from companies like Clarity Systems, Prophix, Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics, Longview and from BI companies like SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, etc.). By carefully assessing the questions above and focusing on the criteria and features most important to your business, you will almost certainly find a CPM solution that can give you a much more connected, productive planning process than could be achieved with Excel spreadsheets.

Mid-Market companies benefit from the significantly better ROI offered by the synergistic relationship between ERP and BI

Strong value in considering/purchasing ERP plus BI simultaneously/at the beginning of the implementation cycle

ERP solutions come with a reporting toolset consisting of a predefined set of reports and with general purpose query tools to generate reports from data within ERP database. Most often, these tools are difficult and confusing to use and rely on an IT team to deliver the requested report, which can take time. ERP systems provide acceptable reports on day-to-day operations but if business requirements change, these static ERP reports need to be customized. Business users need on-demand reports, which are cumbersome and expensive to deliver in a timely manner. By using BI reporting solutions, these systems empower the business user to define and generate the needed reports, freeing valuable IT (or consultant) resources in the process, such that data and time can be better exploited to make meaningful business decisions.

I have been talking to several mid-market companies that have implemented ERP solutions followed by a business intelligence solution (initially deployed for reporting from the data in the ERP solution). Their recommendation, based on their experience of deploying both solutions, is that mid-market enterprises should consider utilizing ERP and BI together (possibly through a planned phased implementation approach), a strategy that would realize significantly higher ROI versus the alternative of considering each independently of the other.

The crux of this recommendation comes from closely looking at the customizations required to make the ERP solution useful for these companies. A significant number of customizations needed in ERP systems are related to generating reports to provide detailed information (in part, similar to that previously obtained through their formerly implemented legacy systems) for decision-making and presenting it in a useful and easy-to-understand manner—a daunting and expensive proposition. Complementing a BI solution with an ERP solution makes the generation of reports required by corporate management and various lines-of-business very easy and eliminates the need for any extensive customizations (as was required to generate these in an exclusively ERP system). The right business intelligence solutions can help extract significant value from the extensive data repositories in an ERP solution. The combination of ERP and BI should also bode well for mid-market companies in the current difficult economic environment, as companies strive for maximum efficiency by looking to cut costs and realize projects that provide them with short-term returns. The companies that have already implemented ERP could benefit by focusing on BI solutions for reporting, corporate performance management and consolidation (CPM) and strategy planning.

Mid-market customers using SAP Business-All-in-One as their key ERP solution have said that the extra time, effort, and money spent to customize their initial ERP could have gone towards paying for a BI solution (in several of the cases they were using SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI). Additionally, the reports they now get from their SAP BusinessObjects solutions (after integration) are more detailed and accurate than before. Other added benefits of this integrated solution—including savings on maintenance, IT administration time, integration and consulting support for upgrades, etc—largely result from the fact that SAP has already spent the time and effort to tightly integrate these two solutions providing better workflow and departmental self-service capabilities to develop and customize reports for their needs. With this solution, individual users can also more easily drill down from these reports to get deeper context to explain the factors influencing what is shown in reports beyond the visually attractive graphs and tables.

As a result, this combined SAP Business-All-in-One and SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI solution could provide significantly better Return on Investment (ROI) than each solution considered independently, and if the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI can be paid for by reducing the customizations required in SAP Business-All-in-One, the combined solution also has a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). With the mid-market focused Business All-in-One fast-start program from SAP coupled with the SAP best practices for the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI for reporting and CPM solution, mid-market enterprises will be able to benefit from fast deployment, more productive and streamlined solution.

Intuit and Microsoft – two SMB market leaders partnering on cloud platform strategies to deliver web applications

This agreement provides an end-to-end applications development environment and marketing/sales channels for application developers to develop and market application solutions to small businesses. Key elements of the agreement include:

• Broadening the applications developer community to develop SMB focused applications – Intuit to provide a SDK to help developers build applications on Microsoft Windows Azure Platform (and Visual Studio) and federate these web applications into Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) and launch these applications through the Intuit App Center (IAC).
• Expand channel for application developers to promote and market their applications – Business Productivity Online Suite into Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) by year-end – Salesforce.com’s Force.com PaaS platform. Microsoft and Intuit will join forces to expand channels for application developers by introducing them to IAC. With capabilities to buy and access these cloud-based applications from the IAC and support for single sign-on will make it easier for SMBs to use these applications.
• Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. SMBs that use BPOS will have access to Intuit’s SMB focused business applications like QuickBooks and additional applications available through the IAC.

This relationship is focused on the U.S., the region where Intuit has majority of its presence. Microsoft and Intuit will support joint marketing programs targeted at the applications developers, channels and SMB companies.

In today’s fast-paced and volatile business climate, SMB need cloud-based application as they provide much better total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to on-premise installed applications. This relationship will provide significant benefits to SMBs that have shown increasing appetite to adopt cloud based solutions. The key benefits to the SMB community from this relationship are:

• For Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform service (PaaS), the Intuit relationship is a key endorsement of Microsoft as a key player in the SMB segment and of a company that has a good understanding of how to work with application developers. This combination will provide good competition to the
• With Microsoft withdrawing from the small business accounting application area, creates a much more favorable partnership environment between the two companies to collaborate on the applications and channels front. A cooperative relationship between these two SMB focused companies will yield tremendous benefits to the SMB community.
• With more than four million Intuit’s QuickBooks customers, the Inuit App Center will present a very attractive opportunity for applications developers to showcase their applications to the QuickBooks user community.

Increasing interest for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) in Mid-Market Enterprises

In today’s world overloaded with buzzwords, terms such as “Business Intelligence (BI)”, “predictive analytics” and “Corporate Performance Management (CPM)” are confusing to mid-market enterprises.

BI technologies provide historical views of a company’s business operation. Some of the enterprise –class BI solutions now include predictive analytical capabilities also. BI is a term used to describe the technology used to access, analyze and report on data relevant to an enterprise. It includes ad-hoc query, reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards, scorecards, search, visualization, etc. Initially, most BI vendors lacked the ability to build models that can project in the future. However, in the past 3-4 years, the enterprise-class BI vendors have added some of these capabilities to replicate functionality offered by CPM vendors. BI and CPM are complementary solutions, and the BI platform provides a natural-basis to build a CPM solution. BI solutions are usually very complex and expensive for most mid-market companies. However, some of the more focused and template/wizards driven “Express” or “Fast-start” solutions, which are more affordable (especially if they are available in a online or appliance) and can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time – are becoming interesting for the mid-market if the vendors can show measurable benefits and short-term ROI.

In the CPM world, “predictive analytics” is generally used to refer to software solutions that automate and manage process related to corporate performance – financial forecasts, budgets, financial strategies, financial consolidation, scorecarding, and reporting. Another term used to identify CMP is BPM (Business Performance Management but this is sometimes confused with Business Process Management – two very different areas). Some CPM solutions regularly monitor some key performance indicators (KPI) in terms of actual vs. budget and, whenever a significant discrepancy is identified, help perform root causes to identify sources that could be causing this.

The BI and CPM solutions do not need to come from the same solution provider, as the two technologies are complementary and could co-exist. However, there may be economies and synergies related to getting them from the same vendor (if offered). In some instances, mid-market ERP solution vendors are now developing deeper integration to some CPM solutions (like NetSuite with Adaptive Planning).

In the current tough economic conditions, this segment is under tremendous pressures to improve financial processes, measurements and management of the mid-market enterprises. To adress the above, mid-market businesses are increasingly deploying CPM solutions to improve planning (forecasts and budgets), manage costs/optimize profits and more importantly risk and compliance.

The following companies provide enterprise and mid-market CPM solutions:

• Enterprise CPM solutions: Clarity Systems, IBM-Cognos, Oracle-Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, SAS
  
• Mid-Market CPM solutions: Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics, ProPhix, mid-market versions of the above solutions

Increasing interest and deployment of these solutions by mid-market enterprises is demonstrated by the double-digit growth rates most of these mid-market solution companies are experiencing. The CPM applications are targeted at the mid-market company CFOs, C-level executives, finance team and corporate strategy teams.

How were majority of these mid-market companies addressing the financial planning issues until now? Majority of these companies are using Excel spreadsheets. Using Excel, has significant accuracy limitations and  the amount of time spend on the planning process. It also denies the organization a collaborative, connected and productive planning process. Mid-market organizations need to take a more objective view to replace Excel based planning and replace them with CMP solutions. Some basic analysis on time (and accuracy achieved) spent on Excel planning and the results achieved will quickly show the benefits and ROI that can be achieved by CPM solutions – these can be split into the “hard” benefits quantifiable by replacing Excel and the many potential “soft” benefits derived from using a CPM solution.

The Compelling TCO Case for Cloud-based business applications in SMB and Mid-Market Enterprises

A 4-year total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective comparing cloud and on-premise business application deployment

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) face a tricky dilemma in today’s tough economic climate. It’s no longer business as usual; companies need to figure out how to survive through the current downturn, and get on track to capitalize on new opportunities that will emerge as the economy starts to grow again. They need business solutions to help them to manage more efficiently day-to-day, and also the intelligence they need to move the business forward.

As SMBs weather through turbulent economic storms, total cost of ownership (TCO) is often top of mind when evaluating new business applications. Many customers have become interested in how cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS) can help lower their costs by eliminating upfront capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs associated with on-premise solutions.

Hurwitz & Associates recently completed an in-depth study comparing TCO of cloud-based business application and equivalent on-premise solutions.

Cloud computing essentially eliminates the need for customers to buy, deploy and maintain IT infrastructure or application software individually. Regardless of the application, the cloud computing vendor takes responsibility for all of the infrastructure required to run the solution–servers, backup, software, operating systems, databases, updates, migration, power and cooling, facility space, etc., and associated internal and third-party staffing costs. Because cloud computing vendors manage all of their customers on a single instance of the software, they can amortize costs over thousands of customers. This yields substantial economies of scale and skill, and lowers TCO.

Key findings from our analysis include:

• Overall TCO for cloud-based integrated solution suite is significantly lower than a comparable on-premise solution. This holds true for both SMB and mid-market firms.
  
• IT Infrastructure costs (hardware, software and maintenance) account for about 10% of the total cost of deploying on-premise business applications.
  
• The cost advantages of cloud computing slowly taper off as the number of users increases beyond mid-market to larger enterprise companies.
  
• Application subscription costs account for two-thirds of the total solution cost in the cloud computing model, where the subscription fee encompasses underlying IT infrastructure and personnel costs required to manage business solution. In comparison, business application costs comprise about 27% of total cost in an on-premise situation.
  
• Costs for internal IT staff and/or value-added reseller (VAR), consultant or systems integrator (SI) resources required for application implementation and support represent a significantly higher percentage of total cost for on-premise solutions than for cloud-based business solutions.
  
• Pre-integrated front and back office functionality in the integrated business application offering contributes to reducing integration complexity and lowers application implementation costs.
  

Intuit’s Federated Apps Cloud Computing Partner Platform Will Provide Very Significant Benefits to ISVs

One of the key technology pain-point (for SMBs) relate to multiple disparate SaaS/on-premise based business and collaboration applications that do not talk to each other (requiring re-entry of the same data) and each with their own separate access, UI, billing and pricing schemas – making it very difficult for them to resolve problems when they occur as they cannot triage the source of the problem. These SMBs lack the IT resources to identify the source of problems in an environment of multiple SaaS applications or have the capabilities integrate multiple soiled SaaS applications (each with a different UI, access requirements and billing platforms) and infrastructure services.

Intuit has a deep understanding of the SMB market based on its proven track record as leading business applications vendor in the U.S. Based on this in-sight, Intuit has developed a much more expansive CONNECTED SERVICES strategy to address the above mentioned technology problem – by providing a platform to connect and distribute all the varied cloud-based SMB applications and also providing a cloud-based development platform for ISVs that want to develop on the Intuit QuickBase platform.

Why is this of value to the ISVs that want to service the 6 million plus SMB companies in the U.S.?

• Aggregation of applications on a cloud-based online application store – the Intuit Workplace portal to be part of the Intuit Marketplace with single sign-on where existing Intuit customers and Intuit and other small business prospects can find, try and buy any of the cloud-based applications that are part of the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) ecosystem.
  
• The biggest attraction for ISVs to join the IPP is the large installed base of Intuit customers in both the SMB and mid-market segments – more than 4 million plus active customers (with 25 million employees); which can be referred to as Customer Cloud. Reaching potential customers was identified as the biggest challenge by both the IVS panel and the VC panel. Selling to this vast SMB population has been the biggest barrier for ISV (especially the ones with less than 50 employees). Existing VAR channels do not work for this segment, online marketing channels are also very expensive and do not provide an adequate level of exposure to these hard-to-reach small businesses – in most cases the SMBs are not even aware of the application solutions. Successful cases of viral marketing based on social networking are rare. The Intuit IPP provides a platform for these ISVs to ride on the coattails of Intuit (several ISVs that are developing on the Salesforce.com Force.com platform have experienced similar success, although that ecosystem is only limited to applications developed on that platform – the federated strategy of Intuit’s IPP has the potential of creating a significantly bigger ecosystem).
  
• The flexibility to:
  
  • develop new (and existing web applications) cloud-based applications with any programming language, database, or cloud computing resource and then publish them to the Intuit Workplace.
    
  • host the cloud-based solution on Intuit Workplace cloud datacenter or an alternate cloud computing data center (Amazon-EC2, Salesforce.com – CloudForce.com, IBM-Blue Cloud, Rackspace, etc.) and at the same time be part of the Intuit IPP application ecosystem and marketplace and get all the benefits associated with it.
    
• The Intuit Workplace will provide the Single billing and e-commerce platform for all the ISV applications in the Intuit marketplace. This is of huge value of these ISVs.
  

This federated application capability now available on the Intuit IPP. Every application on the IPP will work together, use a single username and password, and be accessible via browser. Some of the federated applications will also work with the Intuit family of products. To make all these applications work in harmony on the IPP – Intuit will run a security assessment and privacy policy review on these applications prior to publication on the IPP. The four integration points for the federated applications are:

• Data: To integrate applications with Intuit Partner Platform data, developers must program against APIs provided by Intuit to enable data synchronization
  
• Login: A Federated Identity Web API allows users to use their Intuit Workplace login credentials to access the federated applications within Intuit Workplace.
  
• User management and permissions: Intuit provides developers with a Web API so that their application can handle processes such as inviting additional users to their application.
  
• Navigation: Developers with existing SaaS applications may have to make minor User Interface adjustments, such as removing sign-in/sign-out links within their solutions. The Intuit Workplace provides this in its toolbar to provide users a seamless experience between applications.