Techaisle Blog

VARs, ISVs and Service Providers (SPs) are going full throttle in providing cloud computing and mobility solutions to SMBs. Techaisle’s detailed Channel and corresponding SMB Research shows that there are some demand supply gaps between Cloud & Mobility offerings from channel partners and what the SMB customer needs. This gap between channel supply and SMB demand is illustrated below:



Red bars indicate a gap shown by a higher percentage of SMBs asking for solutions than Channels offering them, which creates shortage and channel opportunity, while the green bars indicate a higher percentage of Channels offering solutions than SMBs demanding; creating surplus capacity and increasing price pressure.

Higher demand-supply gap for Mobility Solutions

The demand-supply gap is higher for mobility solutions than cloud computing. SMBs are demanding mobility solutions; however, both the Channel Partners and their vendors have not yet developed sufficient expertise and solutions to supply them. Cloud computing technology has had longer to develop and mature while mobility has taken center stage (and resources) only in the last two years, resulting in a focus on access to application data rather than development of new applications. Techaisle research suggests that SMBs are particularly interested in mobile applications in the areas of Productivity Suites, Time and Billing Management, Social Media Marketing, Logistics and Field Service applications.

This is giving rise to many smaller, flexible and niche players that are providing point mobility solutions to SMBs, but their main weakness is channel reach. Conversely, large IT vendors with vast number of channel partners such as Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM are still working on viable mobility solutions offerings and corresponding messaging. Many solutions available today from these vendors are targeted towards secure device management, BYOD enablement, and virtualized access to applications across multiple devices. Techaisle analysis shows that SMBs, although excited about these offerings, prefer to have them embedded in overall mobility solutions to reduce complexity in managing and administering multiple layers of IT.

Vertical Cloud Solutions

In the area of cloud computing, SMBs are requesting vertical industry solutions. In order to accomplish this, channels need to go beyond technology knowledge and really understand the dynamics of industries in which their customers operate and become industry subject matter experts. Channel partners would do well to focus on cloud solutions that help SMBs with their industry verticals, disaster recovery, accounting, and new forms of communication such as video conferencing, web conferencing and hosted VOIP. These combinations of cloud services make it easier for SMB customers to handle vendor relationships without having to manage separate account reps, billing and agreements across Infrastructure, Business Productivity, Communication and Industry Vertical Solution categories.

CRM is one of the most adopted cloud business application by SMBs and is also extensively offered by channels. Initiated by Salesforce.com and followed by SugarCRM, Zoho, Microsoft and many others, cloud CRM has already permeated the SMB landscape. IT Vendors like Dell are taking CRM to the next level by providing packaged solutions such as Salesforce.com CRM along with marketing automation from Pardot and Dell Boomi integration platform to increase the functionality, productivity and customization.

However, Techaisle research suggests that channel partners need to focus on delivering solutions that have higher relevancy to SMBs.

The above data is taken from Techaisle’s report titled “US Channel View – Challenges and Trends in Offering SMB Cloud, Mobility and Managed Services Solutions”. The US report is based on 604 channel interviews, and similar detailed surveys and analysis have been done for the Germany, UK, China, Brazil and India Markets.

Tavishi Agrawal
Techaisle

Whiptail, the first company to successfully commercialize multi-level flash recently announced its second-generation family of NAND Flash storage products, Accela and Invicta. Accela is an enterprise class, single chassis, and standalone flash storage product. On the other hand Invicta is a modular storage array. It has some very impressive specifications:

• 6-72 TB of NAND Flash capacity


• Up to 650,000 IPOS


• Upto 7 GB/Sec bandwidth


• Asynchronous replication


• VMWare and Citrix ready

The products are completely scalable. A mid-market customer can begin with Accela and can add Invicta through InfiniBand as the needs grow. Even within the Invicta chassis, a toup to 6 storage nodes with 6 to 12TB and one router can be added as lego blocks as the data needs evolve.

Analyst Speak

Whiptail’s announcement comes at a time when the buzz about big data has reached a crescendo.  And along with big data, vendors and analysts have started to talk about data obesity and therefore need for storage capacity. Granted that storage capacity needs are multiplying but big data poses a bigger challenge – extremely high throughput and read-to-write performance. Traditional storage vendors have tried to make higher-performing storage either by using as many spindles or constricting drives. None of them technically really address the velocity problem – real time streams of high volume information that is both structured and unstructured. Whiptail is taking the conversation away from storage-capacity play to velocity play thereby reducing the cost of transactions.

Even the channel partners wanting to develop or expand their datacenters and offer cloud-based services can use Invicta because of its multi-tennant, multiple addminstrators, and role-based security capabilities.

Invicta is an application acceleration platform that big data purveyors will love to the bane of other other storage vendors.

Anurag Agrawal
Techaisle

We all know that video conferencing adoption is on the rise among SMBs. Collaboration technologies such as Video and Web Conferencing will increasingly be important to SMBs to satisfy their priority to make employees more productive. While these solutions have been around for a long time we believe that broad adoption among SMBs is upon us as evidenced by the priority assigned to such technologies versus the current level of penetration. As per Techaisle’s research data, currently in the US there are nearly 75,000 SMBs that use video conferencing and 790,000 that use web conferencing.

There are obviously many solutions that SMBs can take advantage of ranging from hosted to onsite solutions. Key players such as Microsoft (Live Meeting/Lync), Citrix (GoToMeeting) and Cisco (Webex) have great brand and mind share in the SMB space. However, there comes a time in the life of an SMB, depending upon its vertical or the role of the user, when high-quality, easy-to-use, any-to-any video connections’ based video conferencing becomes too important to ignore. This is where Vidtel steps in.

Vidtel is a cloud-based video conferencing service for any-to-any video connections. Its MeetMe offering allows multiple conferencing participants incredible interoperability, that is to say, it allows for users to seamlessly invoke a video conference, connecting video phones, PCs, tablets, room systems, smartphones and devices using SIP, H.323, Skype or GoogleTalk.

Vidtel is a small but growing organization founded by dynamic entrepreneurs who are focused on bringing affordable high-quality cloud-based video conferencing solutions to SMBs. To that extent, Vidtel has also recently partnered with Vu TelePresence that allows both Vidtel and Vu to gain from each other. Vu is able to bring MeetMe capabilities to its customer base and Vidtel stands to gain from Vu’s already established market presence.

We tried Vidtel’s MeetMe service. It seemed quite simple to initiate and conduct a video conference. To initiate a meeting, a Vidtel SMB customer with a MeetMe account simply provides the meeting room dial-in information to other participants, as one would with an audio conferencing bridge and set up a meeting time. For example, if the meeting were in room 2002, one Skype user would be asked to add Vidtel.2002.1 and the other Vidtel.2002.2 to his/her Skype contacts and dial that contact from either a tablet, mobile or PC/Mac. SIP users would dial This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and H.323 participants would dial 65.50.196.118 then 2002#. Users can even add security PINs.

A question that often arises is, what about support for SMBs? Vidtel provides level 1-4 support via video/phone/email for SMBs directly and levels 2-4 for resellers and wholesale providers who own the SMB customer relationship.

Vidtel offers a tiered pricing structure, from a low of US$199/month to US$599/month, depending upon the number of participants, standard or high-definition video.

SMBs who are seriously debating about using multi-point, any-to-any, high-definition video conferencing capabilities should check out Vidtel.

Anurag Agrawal
Techaisle

Rapid fire announcements from Intuit, all directed towards the betterment of small businesses. Today Intuit announced the availability of Intuit Small Business Revenue Index, which is based on aggregated data from QuickBooks Online. By the very meaning of the term “aggregated” it should be understood that the data is anonymous, that is democratized across 200,000 small businesses. This index is the first of its kind in the market that provides current information on monthly small business revenue. It complements Intuit’s monthly Small Business Employment Index to provide a more complete picture of the economic health of US’s small businesses based on revenue, hiring and compensation trends.

With its latest announcement, Intuit has demonstrated that it is bringing data-driven insights to small businesses, sole-proprietors; insights that were previously only available to large enterprises. This information should empower small businesses to compare themselves against benchmarks and thereby effect changes in their organizations.

It certainly places in the hands of Intuit’s small business customers, power of the data. Both the Employment and Revenue Indexes are updated monthly by Intuit which is far more often than government stats and take a snapshot that is more targeted and pertinent to small business owners. They could use it as a signal for whether it’s time to hire, cut back or increase employee salaries.

As Techaisle had mentioned in its own press release on big data on April 26, 2012, data analytics is equally relevant for small businesses. 12 percent of small businesses using business intelligence are interested in big data analytics. However, they are looking for an IT vendor or partner to collect, collate, and analyze big data and present to these small businesses as a resource, in other words, democratization of big data. The collected data is an aggregation of information being created by other small businesses within the same vertical segment or employee size category. Intuit to my mind, just did it.

Timing by Intuit could not be more perfect.

Anurag Agrawal
Techaisle