By Samara Lynn
With the technology shift to cloud and mobile computing, small businesses have never had so many affordable, feature-rich and scalable business applications at their disposal. We’ve picked ten of the best, apps ranging from sophisticated billing/accounting systems to lightweight web publishing. And of the ten apps presented here, six are strictly web-based, two are mobile apps and only two are locally-installed software. Even a decade ago, most small businesses were shackled to locally installed software for their business needs.
Much of the SMB was pressed to use Office for line-of-business rather than purchasing dedicated Line-of-Business solutions from vendors like Peachtree or ERP programs from Lotus and IBM. Such software was first off, expensive especially when purchasing licenses and often required knowledgeable IT staff to deploy and maintain. Programs in the Office suite were substitutes for more robust solutions: Excel for financials and bookkeeping, Publisher for desktop publishing, Front Page for creating websites and so on.
With the emergence of cloud computing, however, SMBs now have vast numbers of solutions to choose from. Multi-tenancy cloud platforms from the likes of Amazon and Salesforce.com can scale to support millions of users. A small business simply can sign up for any of the wealth of cloud-based services available, and can never outgrow the service no matter how the business grows.
Cloud computing has also made way for the skyrocketing adoption of mobile computing. The two technologies make data and access ultra-portable and always available to users no matter where they may be located.
Of course, cloud computing is not without its dark side. We've witnessed the outrage of users who could not access their financial services when Intuit suffered multiple outages. Even more sobering are the onslaught of security breaches like the hacking of the Sony Playstation network and potential compromise of millions of users’ credit card information.
But even with the issues and risk associated with cloud-computing, many small businesses are choosing to make the leap to the cloud and are in turn reaping great rewards in terms of savings. Moving into the cloud can mean having to purchase less equipment and employ fewer people to support locally installed. It’s not surprising, therefore that this batch of apps, all among the best that we’ve reviewed in the past year, should be 60 percent cloud-based apps. Clearly not all business tasks are ready to migrate to the cloud, but that’s the direction in which business will continue in the year to come.
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