Small Businesses are loving the Cloud – but is it ready for them?

Aug 10, 2010 by admin

Small Businesses are very keen to move to the use of on-line services, “The Cloud”, to support their business. And it’s easy to understand why.

There’s an overhead to running IT, even if you’re only a 5-man outfit. There are applications to be bought and updated, there’s an email system to be maintained, there’s file-servers to be backed up (!) along with all of the other minutia which comes with the IT world. That overhead is a time and money sink and small businesses are sesitive to both – the easiest option then is to make it someone elses problem. A “Cloud” provider.

Getting document management, applications, email, web-sites et-al without needing to actually ‘buy’ anything is pretty cool, especially as you can be fairly sure – if you use a ‘name’ as your service provider – that the service is going to be there whenever and wherever you need it.

Google are leading the march on this, I’m afraid that they’ve got a full package of services which many small businesses find hard to ignore, especially as they can get them for free as part of the Standard Edition. Oh sure, they don’t get some facilities or an SLA but to be honest it’s not many small businesses who’ll have a need for private video streaming and the SLA is simply words as part of the decision-making process.

Microsoft are pitching BPOS as their alternative to Google, primarily because they believe that the communications side of the equations is the key, that email, instant messaging and collaboration are the keystone upon which organisations will build their “Cloud” services consumption. And in part they’re right… those things ARE very important and WILL form the key decision points for many organisations but for a small business they’re not necessarily important enough to pay for over the free alternative.

But wait! Microsoft themselves have a free online service for Small Businesses up to 5 users! Ahhh you didn’t know about that did you!

No… neither did I. And I think that’s the point. Office Live for Small Business is one of the Live suite of services which seems to float around in a perpetual Beta state with no real direction, marketing or strategy in place. For those who have used the Office Live service (similar name, different service) you’ll know that this service is being ‘updated’ in  move to Live SkyDrive. For some this will mean the loss of some functionality – web sites and specific Workspaces being a couple – as Skydrive is basically a document repository. But SkyDrive has one key and critical feature, it has Office Web Applications for free. Yes, as a SkyDrive subscriber you can create Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and OneNote notebooks all on-line and all for free.

Now let’s review, we have Office Live for Small Business which allows the creation of a Website, basic or premium (at a price) email services, document management using SharePoint and  contact management – as well as other functionality – all available for free (up to the aforementioned 5 users) and we have SkyDrive for individuals with Office Web Applications and a bunch of storage space also for free. 2 solutions both accessible via 1 authentication method – the Live ID.

I can’t be the only one who see’s a trick being missed here can I? There must be someone in Microsoft looking at 2 tabs in their browser and saying  ”You know what, if those things worked together that’d be really cool!”.

I may be pre-empting a great announcement but Small Businesses are ready for a move to “Cloud” services, all we need if for those services to be ready for the Small Businesses.