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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” »

business software evaluation mistakes

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” »

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by Elke Schmitt January 25, 2012

You might have read our article on Why Small Businesses Need to be Customer Obsessed at the beginning of January. To complement this article we would like to show you how GetApp.com is highly engaged in applying a customer obsessed approach. One of the best practices we follow is to put our users into the [...]

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Cloud Computing is Far More Than Just Technology

by Peter James January 24, 2012

Cloud computing may be cutting edge technology, but the majority of people using it in the future won’t be tech junkies. So don’t treat them as such. The days of advertising cloud — or even traditional web hosting — by whacking up pictures of servers, some details about data centres, and a great price in [...]

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Supporting your B2B Business – Review of TeamSupport Customer Support Software

by Rakesh Sharma January 23, 2012

  Redux is a Latin word, which means to lead back. This week’s review is a redux post of sorts. We reviewed business-to-business support software TeamSupport back in February 2011. Much has changed since then. The company has come out with a new version of the same product and has bundled in great features to boot. [...]

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What SaaS Product Category will see the most Growth in 2012?

by Christophe Primault January 20, 2012

A month ago I set up a quick poll in the largest Software as a Service (aka SaaS) LinkedIn group to ask industry exerts their opinions about which SaaS product category would see the most growth in 2012. 170 answers and 36 comments later, it is time to share the results of this poll on [...]

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