You know the drill. License software, often at sky-high
prices. Then you pay for consultants, integrators and training. A few months
later, the software needs an upgrade. Rinse and repeat. Expensive and for
decades the way to provide yourself and your employees with word processing,
e-mail and other must-have programs.
A new phase in computer use is beginning. The shift is plump
with opportunities to save almost any organization money in software license
fees, on-premises hardware and consultants. Oh, the consultants — experts in
networks, customization, optimization and dozens of other geekspeak services.
The buzzword for the alternative to on-premises software is
cloud computing. For me, the key event in cloud computing was Apple’s iPhone.
The gizmo made phone calls, but millions of people bought these devices and
realized that the software and services they wanted were out there. The
“there,” of course, is the network cloud.
Netbooks and the iPhone were catalysts. Now the giants of
computing are jumping into cloud computing with both feet. IBM and Verizon have
announced a cloud partnership. Microsoft offers most of its enterprise software
as a cloud service. Google has been expanding its cloud offerings with additional
security, support for Microsoft Exchange, and other features at a healthy pace.
Start-ups abound. Some have a high profile among the
technically savvy, but these services can save some organizations big money.
Let’s try to answer the question, “How can cloud computing help your bottom
line?” Let’s look at two cloud services anyone with basic computer skills can
use immediately.
First, if you have been paying for a contact management system
like Act or wrestling with Microsoft Outlook, try Zoho’s free customer
relationship management service. (http://www.zoho.com/crm) CRM is not
e-mail, although you can use e-mail with Zoho’s service or you can use your
existing e-mail program or some other vendors’ services.
Contact management is a component of CRM. The idea is that
when you meet a person at a business lunch, you can snag his or her card, enter
the details into the contact management system, and then add information about
your subsequent interactions with the person.
If you have three or fewer employees, the service is free. You
get access to Zoho’s leads and sales opportunities module, a contact manager, a
direct mail campaign system, a calendar and an administrative dashboard. There
is a limit of 100 megabytes of data storage, an import limit of 1,000 contacts
per batch and a maximum of 100,000 records. For many small businesses, the free
service is sufficient to get contacts organized and to start using Zoho’s
professional e-mail campaign.
The downside is that you may not know much about Zoho, which
is one of the leaders in cloud-based services or what some call SaaS (software
as a service).
Your information technology expenditure won’t drop to zero but
you can reduce the service and support costs. And once you are familiar with
Zoho, you could drop the on-premises system and its costs. Zoho, like Google
Docs, provides free and low-cost word processing, spreadsheet and presentation
software, too.
Are you paying for conference calls?
You will want to navigate to FreeConference.com and sign up
for an account. It’s free. You can duplicate most of the features of the
traditional AT&T conference call and get some additional features at a very
low cost. One useful service is FreeConference.com’s transcript. I often work
on projects for law firms, and the ability to get a hard copy of some long
conference calls is a real plus. FreeConference.com also offers a digital
recording of the call. You download the MP3 file, and you can use it for
reference or edit it for a podcast if that’s part of your marketing program.
If you have a tech-savvy person handy, you can substitute
Skype.com for FreeConference.com. With a video camera and Skype, you can offer
videoconferencing and the presentation functions of Scribd.com. You and your
conference participants will need to have high-speed connections. Be sure to
alert those on your conference call or webinar about the bandwidth
requirements, too.
How much can you save?
I used to use the Act contact management system. The software
cost me individually more than $100 per year. For me and four colleagues, I was
spending upward of $450 a year for licenses, and I had to have a computer whiz
on tap if I ran into trouble importing contacts or moving data from one
computer to another. For a larger organization, the cost of contact management
can swell to a very large number. With Zoho, I chopped the costs down to less
than $200 per year.
When I switched to FreeConference.com from my traditional
AT&T conference service, my monthly bill dropped from several hundred
dollars a month to zero for conference calls. Your savings may differ, but I am
delighted with the payoff from the cloud.
The range of cloud services is expanding. Rapid service
proliferation makes it difficult to know which service is the appropriate one.
My experience is that testing services is one way to get a sense of what’s
available. If that’s not possible, you can run a query on Bing.com or
Google.com for “cloud computing blogs” and start reading.
Expect to encounter some unusual company and product names.
Examples include Mikogo (www.mikogo.com), Yugma (www.yugma.com), Vyew
(www.vyew.com) and others.
In a couple of years, on-premises software will play a larger
role in many organizations information technology strategy because of its
affordability, ease of use and anywhere availability.
The negatives, which the established software vendors are
eager to point out, include the fear that data will be lost or stolen, the lack
of familiarity with cloud systems, and use of services from vendors that are
not household words.
For a small or midsized business, cloud-based services,
particularly for contact management and sales presentations, are reliable and
readily available. Once you have some experience with the cloud, you can then
consider eliminating such expensive, aging software products like Microsoft
Word, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.
My suggestion is to get your feet wet. This is one plump cloud
that could yield a flood of payoffs quickly and consistently. With cloud
computing, you don’t need an umbrella. Take a bucket to catch your savings.
For more information about the author and
information about his firm’s information consulting services, navigate to
www.arnoldit.com.
