Small businesses have more choices in software than ever before; however, every day the software industry becomes more consolidated and complex. And complexity is the last thing a small business owner needs. What’s worse, the software industry has its own language (usually full of acronyms), which many small business owners don’t speak. Simplicity is king in small business and the software industry has yet to learn that.

What is cloud computing? What is SaaS? What are their advantages? What is their cost? How do they make my business more competitive, and how does it make me more money? In this week’s post and the next several posts I will dive into these issues. But remember: there is not one software solution that fits all businesses, and sometimes complexity leads to simplicity.

Top Ten Software Decision-Making Mistakes

  1. Selecting the right sustainable software platform for future growth.
  2. Ignoring business process utilities and software as a service options.
  3. Not understanding cloud computing advantages and potential issues.
  4. Selecting vendors with no future viability.
  5. Making a software selection without including employees and partners.
  6. Expecting software solutions to easily integrate with existing solutions.
  7. Expecting SaaS solutions to work across all business processes.
  8. Not budgeting for change management and employee empowerment.
  9. Not modeling and/or profiling the business process to be optimized.
  10. Selecting a systems integrator or consultant without expertise in your domain.

The Era of Expendability is Over: Sustainability is Paramount

The combination of interglacial warming and the skyrocketing cost of energy are making sustainability a major initiative in all organizations globally. During the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s the software industry created an era of software expendability. This has significantly changed with the advent of SaaS and software platforms that can grow with your business. Small businesses won’t have the luxury of jumping from software package to package like they did over the last thirty years. It is not cost effective. Successful small businesses that are focused on growth will select a platform that can evolve with the needs of their business, partners and customers. SaaS, cloud computing and middleware platforms that provide extensibility with easy to integrate components are available today. How many of you small business owners are considering and/or understand these alternatives today? I would love to see your comments.

SaaS & Cloud Computing and BPUs are Back to the Future

Like it or not, using Cloud-based SaaS software platforms and services is going back to the mainframe computing days of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The only thing that is different is the platforms, infrastructure and applications that are delivered. I can remember my marine biology days when we waited until after midnight to do our oceanographic compiles on the mainframes and super computers, and we had to buy the time!

Software as a Service is a business process utility; this simply means many companies share an “uncompetitive business process” on a shared secure platform now called a cloud. In the case of CRM SaaS, many companies are now realizing that CRM is a major competitive weapon in maintaining customer loyalty and/or acquiring new customers. SaaS represents a very significant inflection point in the technology industry and it is severely challenging the business models of many large vendors. For small business SaaS delivers information technology (IT) without the IT department, and many small businesses can’t afford an IT department.

There is really nothing new about cloud computing; it is time share and BPU computing on steroids, enabled by the new technologies and computing infrastructures of the millennium. Again, the software industry is making cloud computing more complex than it needs to be and the vendors are positioning themselves for competitive advantage with private clouds and other hoopla. There are many issues that are arising in the cloud computing space that have yet to be addressed, including security, performance, scalability, virtualization and many more. In the mean time in many ways it is truly back to the future because many companies will share a common platform and the applications served up as business process utilities.

MISOG Drives Commoditization and Consolidation

Today in Silicon Valley we talk about MISOG, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Google, and of course Cisco and HP are the major software, services and infrastructure enablers. Google on the other hand has created one of the world’s largest BPUs in its gmail and is now providing organizations with BPU-based personal productivity applications, such as Google Docs, all hosted within its cloud. Consolidation in the technology industry has been rampant over the last ten years, and for many enterprise companies it has become one-stop shopping, as large enterprise software vendors provide nearly all the applications and functionality needed. Many of these large vendors are now focusing on small and medium businesses (SMEs) because that is where the growth is, and they are in the process of acquiring smaller software vendors with domain or industry specific expertise. SME software vendors are also being disrupted by SaaS SMEs, so be careful what vendor you select because they may not be there in the near future.

The Personality of Fish: Sustainable Lobsters in the Millennium

As many of you know I spent ten years researching Northwest Atlantic fisheries and spent some time studying Homarus americanus, the American Lobster. The majority of government-led fisheries management efforts in the US have failed and as a result we have seen the collapse of entire fisheries in some regions.

One of the primary reasons for this is simply fishing pressure: the amount of time fish are harvested and how they are harvested with modern techniques. In-shore lobster fisheries have survived. and many in the industry tout them as being sustainable; however, the reality is that fishing pressure has doubled in many areas. And off-shore lobster fisheries are still in recovery from the fishing pressures of the 1940’s and 1950’s.  

The New England lobster fishery has been extremely resilient, and lobster landings have remained relatively consistent over the last 30-40 years, in spite of increased fishing pressure. The reality of this fishery is that while I was growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s lobster fisherman would regularly fish with 200 pots and get good landings. These days in some areas fisherman fish up to 400-600 pots to get the same catch. Nonetheless, the majority of the inshore lobster fishery has had stable landings in spite of doubling the fishing pressure. The real question is how long will this continue with ocean temperatures warming?

The personality of a lobster is, in simple terms, aggressive, territorial, and cannibalistic. Lobsters spend the first several months of their lives as plankton and the diagram above depicts an early stage of lobster plankton larvae. In sorting through plankton trays at sea, I encountered many lobster larvae and I can tell you that they are aggressive and feisty even as larval plankton. Once the progress through larval to juvenile stages they settle to the ocean bottom and set up a territory usually under a boulder, and in some cases they dig holes.

At night all the lobsters come out to cruise and protect their territory and the battles begin, they will often tear off competitors claws and eat the unlucky loser. Lobsters can live long lives and I have caught them up to 30-40 pounds in Yankee otter trawls on the Georges Bank. One of the largest lobsters in history was found living in a hole off the breakwater in my home town, it was thought to be more than 70 pounds and many divers attempted to catch it to no avail.

I hope you have enjoyed this week’s post and until next time great selling and marketing in the millennium.