Cloud Tech News

Parallels estimates the total global SMB IT market to be worth $1.1 trillion. Ovum is skeptical about the relevance of the total market size to hosted and cloud services but it is clear that the appetite of SMBs to consume hosted and cloud services is seeing strong growth.

On February 15, Sage announced that it was selling off Sage ACT, Sage SalesLogix, and the Sage Nonprofit Solutions product suite, as well as four other non-CRM products in Europe. Ovum sees this as further evidence of Sage's customer-focused transformation and desire to accelerate development of its core hybrid cloud and mobile applications portfolio.

The cloud is commonly envisaged as a utilitarian service, enabling those companies using it to experience ease of access to data in various accounts, homogenisation of such accounts and so on. This utilitarian approach has, broadly speaking, meant that some cloud services lose a certain personal element with their clients.

There are few words that sound like nails on the chalkboard to a small business owner such as "CRM". CRMs can range from basic contact managers, all the way up to a sophisticated tool for operating a business.

As 80% of private businesses involved in foreign trade are looking to upsize, the obvious solution is moving to the cloud.

It has been reported this week that 65% of US small to medium sized businesses (SMEs) say that cloud computing is absolutely essential to their organisation and future growth plans

A recent special report on cloud computing in iWeek outlined some of the key challenges and benefits attached to cloud computing. They are worth reviewing as they give an ‘unclouded’ view of virtualization technologies which are reshaping the way web hosting companies deliver IT resources to SMEs and SMBS over the Internet.

In a recent post, my comrade Chris Chesley identified 5 things SMBs should consider before going virtual for their IT systems. So, taking a cue from him, here are the follow-up “5 Things for SMBs to Consider Before Going Cloud.”