After having worked over several years with multiple SMB customers related to Hospitality, Event Management, E-Commerce, Supply chain, Health care, I realized need for SMB to have cloud based solution to make sure they have access to the latest data at all times, build application faster and avoid delays in roll outs, optimize the cost which really matters most,build statistics with business and operation data which help in decision making.
To be revelant on continous basis, it is important in extending footprint in Digital Marketing, Collaboration,solution compatibility with multi devices. Most of the time, SMB concentrate on the revenue side and mainly focus to build solution around this. In the process, they tend to pick and choose solutions from different vendors for rest of the needs to run the show. Eventually, it leads to discrete set of data distributed across multiple applications/platforms and difficulty to integrate all of the data.Big enterprises corner this better as they plan it upfront and budget it for these type of things.
It is important for SMB to look solution from 360 Degree perspective building and integrating Revenue, Operation, Sales and Marketing and Accounting data.With latest cloud platforms like Salesforce, we can build multiple solutions pretty quickly and easily integrate with other platforms/applications. This has made life easy for SMB to improve the operation, collate all data at single point, collaborate, stay connected wherever they are and helps in taking decision. SMB really needs to take advantage of this and help themselve to keep ahead of the competition. Salesforce makes it easy to build and maintain solutions in a cost effective way and has built in support for desktop, Mobile, Tablets and Wrist watch devices. All of the mentioned solution once to be considered as expensive where Enterprise can afford, it is now highly adoptable by SMB in cost effective manner.
Cloud platform brings in Agility, faster development life cycles, rapid deployment and roll outs which matters most with the changing business environments. It doesn't mater whether you have already invested in the solution and struggling with it or starting to build new, there is a easy way out to get the things in order.