IT Failing 1 in 4 Small Businesses - Open Source and SaaS Can Help
I read with interest, and some alarm, an article by eWeek’s Nathan Eddy that reported on the recent results of an IT effectiveness survey. Unfortunately, the results indicated that many US small businesses are receiving failing grades when it comes to IT effectiveness especially because today’s economy is constraining IT resources so tightly.
One of the suggestions put forth by the survey sponsors is for “small businesses to concentrate on core competencies while seeking to explore outsourcing options, take advantage of free software and other offerings, explore the benefits of cloud computing and consider IT infrastructure alternatives to capital expenditures through hosted hardware, software and services.”
This is hardly a novel recommendation; in fact it is one that has been put forth by open source software and SaaS proponents for quite some time. What’s changed is that open source software products have reached a level of maturity and stability that makes them acceptable to normally risk-averse small businesses. Many SMBs are now willingly embracing free open source products, such as Joomla! and are considering making the modest investment needed to obtain some commercial open source products, such as from CRM vendor, SugarCRM.
Similarly, many more SaaS products are available at price points that are attractive to smaller businesses. It seemed like the earlier days of SaaS were more focused on enterprise-class applications, while today’s SaaS offerings can be purchased for under 10 users. Now, small businesses can run human resources, financials, customer relationship management and more via a web browser and a credit card.
What’s really needed now is continued effort to keep moving free and commercial open source out of the realm of enterprise geeks and into the hands of SMBs. At a time when their IT resources are failing them, it appears that small business owners could use all the help they can get.
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