In this post I will spoke about free services that might be used by a Small or Medium Business, but before i would like to take your attention on a study realized by The University of Manchster.
They realize a reaserch regarding The Economic Impact of the Cloud on UK Business. (here the full case study:
http://goo.gl/H9Zz2 ) They asked 1,300 companies in the UK and the US, across a variety of sectors, businesses small, medium and large, a series of questions.
The analisys of the data have helped produce a exciting snapshot of how business are using the cloud now. Below the results:
- Cloud computing saves money.
- Cloud computing helps increase competitiveness.
- Cloud computing offers exciting possibilities for businesses of all sizes.
The study shows just what an important impact cloud computing is having on UK and US businesses. It's particularly interesting that, despite the ongoing economic backdrop, half of businesses on both sides of the pond are actually increasing profits and growing their business through use of the cloud.
This includes investing in headcount and wages as well as driving further innovation.
It all suggested that, while small businesses generally have a positive perception of the cloud, there are still barriers and a gap in understanding how to use the services.
In particoular Small and medium-sized enterprises particularly stand to benefit from a move to the cloud: there’s no need to spend a lot of money buying on-premises IT infrastructure, and cloud services can be scaled according to need.
Below free services that in my opinion need consideration because will help SMB to store data, run software in a very simple way.
OpenOffice.org:OpenOffice.org. It’s not as powerful as its commercial competitors, but it provides functional word processing, a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a database and a presentation software that can do anything a small company may need, and it’s completely free.
DropBox:DropBox offers a private file sharing solution that is free and easy to use. Instead of trading files back and forth via email (or worse, via physical discs and mail), you can use DropBox.
FreeCRM:
FreeCRM is perfect if you need a free tool for contact and lead tracking, sales and contact management, business management, customer service, and sales forecasting. The caveat is that the free version is self-service and only provides up to 10 MB of storage, but it does offer unlimited users. For SMEs that don’t have literal thousands of customers, the free version should suffice. If you have a customer base that is larger than what the free version can support, your company probably has enough money to upgrade to the paid version
Evernote:With the free Evernote, you can take notes on your iPhone or iPad and it’s still going to be syncrhonized on all of your devices. It also supports tagging so organization and categorization are easily done.
BillingBoss:With BillingBoss – you get the same kind of powerful functionality found in commercial accounting suites, but you get it for free. There’s no need to worry about security as the service is run by one of the world’s leading business software companies, and uses state of the art encryption for your files.
All the above listed solution can provide real benefits to small businesses, increasing efficiency, time-management, remote working potential and saving physical space, but there are also pitfalls to avoid.You should choose your cloud provider the same way you would choose any other supplier and ask a few crucial questions:
• Is the cloud service provider stable and trustworthy, with a reputation to lose?
• Are the conditions of contract reasonable and fair to you?
• Will it benefit your business?
Look before you leap when considering a cloud service, but if the answer to these questions is yes, don't be afraid to take the plunge.
