The Savvy CIO

Cloud computing has been generating a lot of buzz and by all accounts looks to increase in 2010. But even with all the hype (or perhaps because of it), we regularly get asked, “What is cloud computing?”

That’s a great question. There isn’t a broad consensus on exactly what cloud computing is and is not. I don’t think a valuable answer can be found in the technical discussion of what services are and are not cloud computing. Instead, the real definition is in how cloud computing meets a business need.

Eric Knorr and Galen Gruman at InfoWorld have put their finger on it:

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Highland isn’t a software reseller shop. We do custom solutions.

So when we advocate a piece of software that we didn’t create, we feel a bit of obligation to justify our preference.

Any CRM worth its salt offers similar benefits to an organization. Why do we think SugarCRM is currently the best CRM to offer our clients? Here’s a peek into a bit of Highland history and our thoughts on the matter.

Five years ago, it became obvious to us that CRM was a recurring need among our development clients. We had built a few custom CRMs from scratch, but were looking for a solid building block we could use in our solutions so we could stop re-inventing the wheel.

We prefer open, flexible, low cost solutions, and those preferences drove our search process. After extensive research and getting our hands on several possible solutions, we began working with SugarCRM in 2005 as part of Sugar’s open source community. Since that time we’ve deployed Community and Professional Editions of SugarCRM for our clients, both as a stand-alone CRM solution and integrated into a larger web application deployment.

So why do we use SugarCRM instead of other offerings like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics? Without a full competitive breakdown, here are four quick reasons we’ve come to strongly prefer SugarCRM. read more »

We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
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Ever wonder what the “cloud” part of cloud computing looks like?

It can be easy to think of the cloud as some vague place “out there” where things are taken care of. After all, it is called the cloud. In reality, the cloud is comprised mostly of companies—like ours—that provide web-based services out of data centers.

Want to see the cool, techie insides of the cloud? View this tour from Equinix. (Warning: Video is a bit goofy at times, all part of the geeky cool factor.)

Image from www.equinix.com/locations/tours/

We would have liked to show you our own pictures of the center, but a “no camera” policy is a part of the security standards, along with biometric access and 24×7 security guards.

Why are we excited about data centers?

Earlier this month we expanded our hosted services to a second state-of-the-art Tier 3 data center.

Why two data centers?

As our hosted services continue to grow, we needed more space for servers, more power, etc. By growing into a second data center, we’re able to provide separate geographic locations for servers and backups to our clients who host business critical applications and desire this level of disaster recovery.

What’s a Tier 3 center?

Data centers are rated from Tier 1 (the closet in your office) to Tier 4 (can stay online during a major disaster and last 3 days without power). Tier 3 centers provide extremely high levels of security, power, speed, redundancy and disaster preparedness. Read about data center tiers and what they mean.

Our commitment to world class data center hosting for our clients helps set us apart. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about our hosted and cloud computing services.

Google recently launched a “Going Google” billboard campaign in several major US cities, including our beloved Chicago. The ads focus on Google Apps for small and medium businesses: Gmail, Calendar, Google Documents and Google Chat.

The Savvy CIO is always interested in the best solutions for Chicago small businesses, and believes cloud computing is often a smart and cost-effective. So we took a closer look at Google Apps for small businesses: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Not to spoil the ending, but boy does it get ugly.
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We’ve just finished a series of posts about how small businesses can get the most out of hosted solutions. It all started with Forrester’s survey revealing the most popular hosted solutions for small businesses.

Here’s a brief recap of the key information in one place, as well as links back to the original posts.

Customer Relationship Management: How to Get the Most out of a CRM

Key Benefit: Help sales and support win, keep and grow business by organizing customer information and history.

Most popular providers: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM (we use this), ZohoCRM

Email and Collaboration: How to Get the Most out of a Collaboration System

Key Benefit: Increase productivity with best of class email and calendaring tools, without the huge costs of Microsoft Exchange.

Most popular providers: CommuniGate, Kerio, Zimbra (we use this)

Content Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Content Management System

Key Benefit: Make content updates to your own website without the ongoing need for a developer or designer.

Most popular providers: Drupal, webEdition (we use this), Wordpress

Document Management System: How to Get the Most out of a Document Management System

Key Benefit: Store and find files more easily than on a file server, get to files anywhere, help teams work together on documents, control who sees what, and provide client access to deliverables.

Most popular providers: Alfresco, HighlandShare (we use this), KnowledgeTree

Why is it that in 10 seconds on Google you can find exactly what you are looking for in an entire world of online information, but you could spend 10 minutes (or more!) locating a file on your local file server?

If you can’t remember where you—or someone else—put that file, it’s File Treasure Hunt time. A File Treasure Hunt involves clicking into dozens of folders inside of folders inside of folders. Like a bunch of bad blind dates, they all seem promising until you look a little closer.

If you’re getting desperate, you could ask the Windows Search Dog to try and track it down, then check back in the afternoon to see what he dug up. If you have ever used the Search Dog to find something on a file server, you instantly hate him. He’s slow, inaccurate and often completely useless. I suspect he’s aging and partially blind.

If you have a hard time finding files stored on your server, that’s one sign you may need to revolutionize how you store your company files with a document management system.

Here are seven more signs that a small business may need a document management system, and how a document management system can help fix what’s broken.

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Twitter, media darling that it is right now, is logging a bit of bad press for having company documents stolen.

The short version is a hacker got into an employee’s web email account, and from there was able to access information stored in Twitter’s Google Apps account.

Depending on where you read the story, the spin is:

Twitter has serious security issues (partially true)
Cloud computing is unsafe (mostly false)
Someone needs a better password (clearly true)

The real lesson to be learned here is be extremely cautious with your email. Think about it. Virtually everything online is linked to your email account.

Are you equally vulnerable?

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Continuing our series of posts on how to implement the most popular cloud computing services for small business, we come to collaboration tools: advanced email, group calendaring, shared contacts and more.

For many, collaboration means Microsoft Exchange. But Exchange is costly for a small business.

If you have 500 users and spend the $13,000 a year it typically costs to own Exchange, the cost per user is a modest $26 per year. With 50 users, the cost per user is a whopping $260 per year. 10 users? $1,300 per user per year. Yikes.

What collaboration tools actually make sense for a small business?

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Where are small businesses finding value in cloud computing?

A recently released report by Forrester Research sheds some light on the subject.

The top five business processes small businesses are moving to the cloud are:

1. Customer service and support
2. Sales force automation
3. Content management
4. Collaboration
5. Marketing automation

What’s to note? You can target THREE of these processes with ONE cloud solution.

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