This is the second part of a blog post about the best Cloud computing predictions related to small businesses.
In Part 1, we looked at the hot Cloud-based application categories that are likely to get the most tractions with small businesses
In this article, we focus on the most importnat underlying trends in small business cloud computing. Continue reading “Best Small Business Cloud Computing Trends” »
Through the end of last year and beginning of this year, we have been reading tons of blog posts from industry leaders about Cloud computing predictions related to small businesses.
So we decided to do a bit of curation work and share with you what we believe are the most relevant ones to small business owners.
We broke them down into two high-level topics and share a link to the referring blog in case you want to know more on a specific subject.
Part 1: Cloud-based application categories that are likely to get the most tractions with small businesses
Part 2: Underlying trends in small business cloud computing
Today we are covering the first part about product categories.
Continue reading “Best Small Business Cloud Applications Forecasts” »
Salesforce.com just unveiled Desk.com, which is likely to open the world of online customer service to thousands of small businesses.
Desk.com is the new name for Assistly.
Saleforce.com bought Assistly in September 2011 after an initial strategic investment in the company. Assistly was one of the greatest startup success story last year as the company founded by Alex Bard only launched in September 2010.
But there is much more to this news than just a name change and the new Desk.com promises to revolutionizing customer service for small businesses.
Let’s see how you can benefit from this solution.
Continue reading “Welcome to Desk.com a Social and Mobile Help Desk for Every Small Business” »
Our software evaluation partner Eval-Source have published an interesting post where they share their experience about the mistakes small businesses make when evaluating software for their business, often leading them to overbuy.
When looking at evaluating software small businesses tend to:
evaluate too many solutions
forget to work with an evaluation script
be mislead by cool but useless features
forget their main objective
Let’s look into these mistakes in more details and how they can be mitigated. Continue reading “4 Mistakes to Avoid when Choosing Software for your Business” »
In continuation to our article about the age of the customer, explaining why small businesses need to be customer obsessed, we stumbled upon a great article from our cloud consultants partners VM-Associates.
They pick on the example of luxury stores to explain how small businesses can learn from customer support best practices and they refer to online customer support software as a way to make customer service accessible to any company.
Here is the opening question: When you go shopping in a luxury store, why do you choose one and not the other?
Their guess: your interpersonal relationships and history with the people behind the stores. Continue reading “Great Customer Service Matters for Small Businesses – A ZenDesk Success Story” »
Just as we expect telephone service to be available 24/7/365, we increasingly expect Internet or Intranet based services to be available without interruption.
To provide this quality of service, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers have to be able to detect and respond instantly to any unforeseen events that may affect their service, and resolve problems before anything breaks.
This means that they have to be able to monitor all aspects of their operation that can alert them to potential service degradations and help them find and fix the root cause of problems.
Librato Metrics is designed for use by DevOps (a new function in IT organizations that bridges the gap between development and operations and a major movement, specifically in PaaS and SaaS companies) and operations teams to monitor their SaaS and PaaS infrastructure and applications.
It enables them to store any and all metrics they need to track the health of their operation, to configure alerts, visualize the metrics in graphs, build dashboards, and perform root-cause analysis. We will look at its interface, features, and see how it can be of use to you.
Continue reading “A New way to Measure Cloud Metrics – Review of Librato Metrics” »
